Oregon Historical Quarterly Spring 2005

The Columbia Country and the Dissolution of Meriwether Lewis: Speculation and Interpretation, by David L. Nicandri
David Nicandri incorporates the Lewis and Clark journals, other explorers’ records, recent scholarship on Meriwether Lewis and the expedition, and contemporary understandings of mental disorders to speculate about causes of Lewis’s apparent suicide in 1809. Nicandri's interpretation suggests “that the first cracks in Lewis’s psyche occurred in the Pacific Northwest.” In his analysis, he evaluates Lewis’s negative descriptions of the Columbia country and his experiences with the Native peoples who lived along the river. He disagrees with Stephen Ambrose’s theory that Lewis suffered from manic-depression and argues that Lewis may have suffered from either cyclothymia or post-traumatic stress disorder.

Soldier to Advocate: C.E.S. Wood’s 1877 Diary of Alaska and the Nez Perce Conflict, by George Venn
Scholar and poet George Venn explores the complexity revealed in C.E.S. Wood’s 1877 diary to illustrate the young man’s dual identities as a soldier and a literary man. Venn includes an introduction and epilogue to the diary itself, which he has thoroughly annotated. Among the materials Venn examines are several poems Wood wrote after the 1877 Nez Perce conflict. Venn found that Wood’s diary “cryptically recorded his awakening . . . to racism, oppression, injustice, and militarism, the same forces he had resisted intuitively as a cadet at West Point.”

Town Boosterism on Oregon’s Mining Frontier: James Vansyckle and Wallula, Columbia Riverport, 1860-1870, by G. Thomas Edwards
Using newspaper accounts written by businessman and politician James Vansyckle and his contemporaries, historian G. Thomas Edwards examines howf one man worked to build a successful town in Portland’s hinterland. Illustrating the rapid changes in the region, Edwards writes: “While Willamette Valley promoters had sought to gain from the nearby agricultural frontier, later speculators wanted to establish steamboat landings on the Columbia River in order to draw wealth from a vast interior mining frontier.” In telling the story of Vansyckle and Wallula, Edwards explores the connections among politics, transportation monopolies and speculations, personal experience, and boosterism in the nineteenth-century development of the Pacific Northwest.

A Long, Strange Yarn: Ken Kesey and the Pendleton Round-Up, by Andrew P. Duffin
In this historical analysis of Ken Kesey’s final novel, Last Go Round: A Real Western, historian Andrew Duffin relates the novel’s characters and location to the real-life people and places that inspired it. Although Last Go Round is a work of fiction, Duffin argues that it may give readers a more realistic understanding of the Pendleton Round-Up than traditional histories of that event. “Kesey,” writes Duffin, “using historical and imagined characters and situations, analyzes a multitude of historical angles germane to the early twentieth-century inland Northwest: race relations and racial diversity, the ubiquity of market capitalism and acquisitive behavior, growth and development problems, and the cultural meaning of rodeos.”

Oregon Voices
Broadway Cabs Yellow with Age, by John Wendeborn
Jazz musician and music critic John Wendeborn tells how his father bought into the Broadway Deluxe Cab Company in 1942. In those days, “Broadway cabs were a gleaming black, accented by a hand-painted silver shield on the door that proudly bore the owner’s name and cab number.” Wendeborn also drove a Broadway cab during the 1950s, and his vivid recollections bring to life people and places — including musicians and cab stands — long gone from Portland’s downtown scene.

Research Files
A Chronicle of the Battleship Oregon, by Ken Lomax
Researcher Ken Lomax chronicles the battleship Oregon, “among the most famous ships of the U.S. Navy.” In 1898, the Oregon sped from the West Coast through the Straits of Magellan to join U.S. forces in the Spanish American War, where the ship’s crew played a decisive role in the American naval victory. Using reports and newspaper accounts, Lomax depicts Oregonians’ passion for the ship from its beginning in 1896, through its time as a war memorial and museum in downtown Portland during the 1920s and 1930s, to its final sale for scrap metal in 1956. He suggests that “the battleship’s story may have resonated with the descendants of western pioneers who still felt personally connected to the pioneer experience during the first half of the twentieth century.”

David Peterson del Mar, Oregon’s Promise: An Interpretive History, reviewed by Charles P. LeWarne

Lewis A. McArthur and Lewis L. McArthur, Oregon Geographic Names, seventh edition, reviewed by Alexander B. Murphy

Jarold Ramsey, New Era: Reflections on the Human and Natural History of Central Oregon, reviewed by Thomas C. Buell

Jewel Lansing, Portland: People, Politics, and Power, 1851-2001, reviewed by Geoffrey B. Wexler

Elinor Langer, A Hundred Little Hitlers: The Death of a Black Man, the Trial of a White Racist, and the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement in America, reviewed by Lauren Kessler

 

Elizabeth Jacobs, edited by William R. Seaburg, The Nehalem Tillamook: An Ethnography, reviewed by Rick Minor 

 

Robert Galois, A Voyage to the North West Side of America: The Journals of James Colnett, 1786-89, reviewed by Herbert K. Beals

Roger L. Nichols, American Indians in U.S. History, reviewed by Jeffrey Ostler

Nicholas O’Connell, On Sacred Ground: The Spirit of Place in Pacific Northwest Literature, reviewed by Albert Furtwangler

Jerome Greene, Morning Star Dawn: The Powder River Expedition and the Northern Cheyennes, 1876, reviewed by Timothy Lehman

Ronald H. Limbaugh and Willard P. Fuller, Jr., Calavaras Gold: The Impact of Mining on a Mother Lode Country, reviewed by Brian Shovers

 

Diana Myers Bahr, Viola Martinez, California Paiute: Living in Two Worlds, reviewed by Alanna Kathleen Brown

Effie Graham, Jackie Pflaum, and Elfrida Nord, editors, With a Dauntless Spirit: Alaska Nursing in Dog-Team Days, Six Personal Accounts, reviewed by Terrance Cole