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PODCAST

Offbeat Oregon History podcast

www.offbeatoregon.com (finn @ offbeatoregon.com)

A daily (5-day-a-week) podcast feed of true Oregon stories -- of heroes and rascals, of shipwrecks and lost gold. Stories of shanghaied sailors and Skid Road bordellos and pirates and robbers and unsolved mysteries. An exploding whale, a couple shockingly scary cults, a 19th-century serial killer, several very naughty ladies, a handful of solid-brass con artists and some of the dumbest bad guys in the history of the universe. From the archives of the Offbeat Oregon History syndicated newspaper

history places & travel

All Episodes

00:10:41

Oregon Vortex: 95 years of keeping experts guessing

Offbeat Oregon History podcast ·

2026/01/09

ABOUT 20 YEARS ago, Alex Hirsch, a student at the California Institute of the Arts in Santa Clarita, set out to make a low-budget short animated film that he hoped would become a demo reel one day. It was called “Gravity Falls” … you have perhaps heard of it, yes?Hirsch used the 11-minute reel to pitch Disney on his show, and they snapped it up. To say it was a success is to understate things quite a bit; when it debuted in 2012 the show was probably the biggest new thing on The Disney Channel

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00:09:06

The crazy story of U.S.’s first woman governor (Part...

Offbeat Oregon History podcast ·

2026/01/08

HALFWAY THROUGH HIS second term in office, Governor Chamberlain ran for a seat in the U.S. Senate, and won the election. So he resigned his office as governor in favor of his Secretary of State, Frank W. Benson, and prepared to board an eastbound train to take his new seat. There was a problem, though.... (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/23-04.caralyn-shelton-first-woman-guv-620.html)

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00:09:35

The crazy story of U.S.’s first woman governor (Part...

Offbeat Oregon History podcast ·

2026/01/07

IF YOU ASK most Oregonians who the first woman governor in state history was, they’ll have an immediate answer … but they’ll be wrong.Conventional wisdom holds that the first woman to take the gubernatorial purple in the Beaver State was Barbara Roberts, who was elected to the job in 1990. In fact, that’s almost true … but, of course, “almost” doesn’t work very well as an answer to a true-or-false question. The truth is, Barbara Roberts was the first elected woman governor in Oregon history. But

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00:08:11

Land-fraud swindlers plundered Oregon badly (Part 2...

Offbeat Oregon History podcast ·

2026/01/06

Happily ensconced in their little bubble of like-minded businessmen and politicians, the land thieves had gotten to be a bit out of touch with how their activities were playing with the public. As the new century dawned, the old “greed is good” ethos of the Gilded Age was wearing very thin. Members of the public, watching fat cats from out of state (or even out of country) take advantage of the situation to build vast absentee empires, were starting to notice, and resent. (For text and pictures, see

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00:09:17

Land-fraud swindlers plundered Oregon badly (Part 1...

Offbeat Oregon History podcast ·

2026/01/05

ON THE MORNING of Dec. 7, 1904, Stephen A.D. Puter had just arrived at the office of U.S. Marshal Jack Matthews. He was expecting some friends to come by … and bail him out of jail.Puter had just been convicted of masterminding a plan to swindle the U.S. government out of thousands of acres of prime timberlands. He had not yet been sentenced. Like all convicts, he had the option of either staying in jail until sentencing, or posting bail. In his case, bail was set at $4,000. He figured his friends

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00:09:13

'Most Wanted' desperadoes found a home and respect in...

Offbeat Oregon History podcast ·

2026/01/02

LATE IN THE MONTH of March, 1948, in the small coastal town of Gearhart, Pauline Virgin, 12, and her cousin Navarre Smith, 14, were listening to the famous “Gang Busters” radio program on radio station KEX (A.M. 1190). The radio host was telling the story of a wanted criminal named John Harvey Bugg, who back in 1945 had kidnapped a county sheriff, robbed him, and tied him to a telephone pole. Listeners were urged to be on the lookout for a man who walked with a limp, loved horses, and had the

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00:08:43

Running from FBI? Hide in a friendly Oregon town!

Offbeat Oregon History podcast ·

2026/01/01

HAPPY NEW YEAR! In the spirit of the American tradition of the season, today we’re going to explore the stories of two Missouri men whose New Year’s Resolutions probably once included “Give up crime” and “Hide from the F.B.I.”This is the sort of thing that used to be very easy to do in Oregon, which is actually the only state (so far as I have been able to learn) to have ever had one of its U.S. Senators serve under an alias which he adopted while running from law enforcement. (For text and

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00:09:08

P-town mansion was once home of starvation cult

Offbeat Oregon History podcast ·

2025/12/31

The motto of Kate Ann Williams' cult was “Pray and be Cured,” and adherents went on rigorous 40-day fasts that occasionally killed them. The cult disappeared after its leader, who was Mayor George Williams' wife, starved herself to death. (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1204d-kate-williams-starvation-cult.html)

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00:08:58

Oregon man’s wife killed his SCOTUS appointment

Offbeat Oregon History podcast ·

2025/12/30

Senate committee went from a solid consensus to confirm George H. Williams, to a firm determination not to, in just one week. The cause? Most believed it was because of the arrogant attitude of Mrs. Williams toward the senators' wives. (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1204c-williams-scotus-confirmation-scotched-by-wife.html)

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00:08:47

‘Cape Foulweather Light’ built on the wrong cape

Offbeat Oregon History podcast ·

2025/12/29

Today known properly as Yaquina Head Light, the state's tallest lighthouse is a popular tourist attraction, and until recently was the home of the nation's only wheelchair-accessible tidepools. (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1706b.yaquina-head-light-should-have-been-cape-foulweather-light-447.html)

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00:12:15

Body snatchers' incompetence actually saved them from...

Offbeat Oregon History podcast ·

2025/12/26

Police figured out who the body snatchers were before they even had time to think about writing a ransom note — so their sentences were much lighter than they would have been if they'd had time to add extortion to the rap. (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/23-03.body-snatchers-resurrected-william-ladd-619.html)

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00:10:43

Body snatchers plotted to steal dead mayor’s corpse...

Offbeat Oregon History podcast ·

2025/12/25

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY was a kind of golden age of body snatching. Digging up the freshly dead to cash the corpse in at the back door of a nearby medical school was — well, not common exactly, but far from unheard-of. So when, around the middle of May 1897, Daniel Magone and Charles Montgomery asked a 20-year-old wood hauler named William Rector to help them steal a corpse out of River View Cemetery, Rector didn’t react the way you or I would. A job was a job, and Rector needed the work, and

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00:11:34

‘Blue Ruin’ drove Oregon to drink—and prohibition

Offbeat Oregon History podcast ·

2025/12/24

Before Oregon was even a state, its territorial government outlawed all booze. Why? It all has to do with a fellow who could probably be called the true founder of the city of Portland — and his ever-bubbling moonshine still. (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1311d-blue-ruin-whiskey-sparks-oregons-first-prohibition.html)

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00:12:03

Larry Sullivan's 'second act' career dwarfed his...

Offbeat Oregon History podcast ·

2025/12/23

BY THE TIME George Graham Rice met Larry Sullivan at Sullivan and Grant’s “palace” in Goldfield, he was doing a booming business in Nevada as the owner and copywriter of an advertising agency, working with the local mine owners. He provided a full-service kind of operation — not only placing ads for investors, but also sending out hundreds of fake “human interest” stories about life in the mining camps for East Coast and West Coast newspapers to run. These articles were basically dime-novel

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00:10:49

Boss shanghaier Sullivan’s mining-stock fraud career...

Offbeat Oregon History podcast ·

2025/12/22

For anyone interested in the shanghaiing of sailors on the old Portland waterfront, the name “Larry Sullivan” needs no introduction. Smooth, polished, well-connected and ruthless, Larry Sullivan was essentially the Boss Tweed of the Portland waterfront from the early 1890s right up to the moment the music stopped. But in 1904, as the upcoming Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition drew near, a reforming spirit was in the Portland air. Thousands of visitors were about to come to Portland and see it

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00:09:14

Brides were stripped of U.S. citizenship at the altar

Offbeat Oregon History podcast ·

2025/12/19

Women who'd married German men suddenly learned they'd been legally (and very unconstitutionally) made stateless, and were forced to register as 'enemy aliens'; those who'd married Chinese men fared even worse. (Statewide; 1910s, 1920s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1312e-germans-in-oregon-enemy-aliens.html)

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00:09:46

Oregonians had the jump on California Gold Rush

Offbeat Oregon History podcast ·

2025/12/18

If you’d been lucky enough to live in Portland in July of 1848, you would have been able to say, literally, that your ship had come in.The ship in question was the sailing ship Honolulu. And, funny thing: she arrived in port in ballast, with her cargo holds empty. That raised some eyebrows. At the time, Oregon was not even part of the U.S.A. yet — just a vast extranational territory jointly claimed by the U.S. and Britain. There was no national government authority to issue money, nor was there

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00:08:57

Palatial riverboat caught in hurricane on open sea

Offbeat Oregon History podcast ·

2025/12/17

Designed for calm inland waterways, the sidewheel steamboat Alaskan was no match for the massive late-spring gale that pounced on it off Cape Blanco one fateful night in 1889. (Cape Blanco, Curry County; 1889) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1311c-riverboat-alaskan-caught-in-offshore-hurricane.html)

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00:15:58

Drunk looting party broke out at scene of shipwreck

Offbeat Oregon History podcast ·

2025/12/16

ON THE MORNING OF NOV. 5, 1915, at the back of the entrance to Coos Bay, a big steamship could be seen towering improbably over the beach, stuck fast in the sand close to shore.This was the Santa Clara, a 233-foot steamer on the Portland-San Francisco run. The Santa Clara didn’t much look like the scene of a humanitarian disaster, jutting out of the sand nearly plumb and level and nearly high and dry; but appearances were deceiving. Sixteen people died trying to get ashore when she first struck,

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00:08:42

Civil War plotters hoped to get West Coast to secede

Offbeat Oregon History podcast ·

2025/12/15

Dreamed up by supporters of the old south, the plan envisioned an independent “Pacific Republic” as a slave state — to be stocked with slaves by a sort of bait-and-switch swindle. But the supporters misjudged public opinion badly. (Salem, Marion County; 1860s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1503d.pacific-republic-scheme-331.html)

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610 results

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