The Offbeat Oregon History Podcast: Fresh Edition - No Reruns

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

Daniel Magone had a plan. He was going to dig up the corpse of the most important and prominent businessman in old Portland, and hold it for ransom. So he and his drinking buddy, Charlie Montgomery, hired a couple of laborers, told them they were digging up dead paupers to sell to the medical college as cadavers (it was 1897, did I mention that?), waited for dark, and got busy ...
It did not go as planned.

618. Oregon had the jump on the California Gold Rush

Nothing like being right on the spot, or a few days' journey away, when the biggest gold strike in world history breaks out, right? Before 1848 Oregon had a problem of there not being any money to use to trade with. After that year, it would have the opposite problem!

617. Land-fraud swindlers plundered Oregon badly

Ever wonder how so much timberland ended up owned by giant out-of-state companies like Weyerhaeuser and Georgia-Pacific? A lot of it is down to the land-fraud swindlers. How they did it, and how they were finally stopped, is the topic of this episode!

616. Blum, Dunbar smuggled opium by the shipload

The story of William Dunbar, Nat Blum, and the Merchants Steamship Company is one of the weirdest. Most drug smugglers this incompetent don't operate at this kind of scale -- you can't get big enough to have a fleet of steamers by being this dumb.
But most successful middle-aged businessmen don't turn to crime as a side hustle either ... or adopt an orphan boy who grows up to help start World War II either.

615. Yosuke Matsuoka: The ex-Oregonian who helped start World War II

In the early 1890s, a politically well-connected drug smuggler in tiny, faraway Portland took a young Japanese boy into his household as a companion for his 14-year-old son.
That little boy’s name was Yosuke “Frank” Matsuoka, and he'd grow up to be the Foreign Minister of Imperial Japan and the chief architect of the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Fascist Italy, just before the Second World War.

614. The bloody manhunt for Harry Tracy, ‘king of western outlaws’

THE “GOLDEN AGE of Outlaws” had a good run — almost 40 years. It kicked off just after the Civil War, when thousands of battle-hardened Confederate veterans with nothing to lose spread out across the Western frontier; and it ended in a field in eastern Washington on Aug. 5, 1902....

553.To defeat rivals, politician threw a big drunken house party

The fix was in -- all the legislators who needed to be bribed had been paid off -- so John Mitchell felt comfortable 'fessing up to his plans to double-cross Jonathan Bourne and his "Friends of Silver." But Bourne had a plan to turn that around ...
NOTE: This "fresh" feed will be closing at the end of 2019. The main 5-day-a-week Offbeat Oregon feed (http://ofor.us/p) will continue.

552.Bungling attempt by old crimps marked end of shanghaiing era

Bunco Kelley was out of prison, Mysterious Billy Smith was at loose ends, and Jumbo Riley was looking for something to do ... somehow, they ended up at a table at Erickson's Saloon with the Jost brothers, talking about getting back into the shanghaiing business. Alas, it was not to be ... (Portland, Multnomah County; 1907)

551.Mysterious Billy Smith, Part 2: The plan to license shanghaiers

Oregon's Sailors' Boardinghouse Commission seemed completely uninterested in any enforcement activity other than ordering Larry Sullivan's competitors to leave the business. Naturally, those competitors fought back as best they could.
NOTE: This "fresh" feed will be closing at the end of 2019. The main 5-day-a-week Offbeat Oregon feed (http://ofor.us/p) will continue.

550.World boxing champ by day, shanghaier by night: Part 1 of 2

After Jim Turk's death, former pro prizefighter Larry Sullivan virtually owned the shanghaiing business in Portland ... but there was one competitor he couldn't seem to shake: 'Mysterious Billy' Smith, boxing's Welterweight Champion of the World -- whose 'day job' was crimping sailors.