Oregon Historical Quarterly Summer 2002

Refuges and Reclamation: Conflicts in the Klamath Basin, 1904-1964
(read the article)
by Doug Foster

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Klamath Basin of southern Oregon was called the “land of lakes” and had an abundance of fish and fish-eating birds. By the summer of 2001, demands for water in the region exceeded supply, erupting in a bitter “fish vs. farms” water-rights controversy. Doug Foster reviews the development of laws and regulations governing land use in the Klamath Basin, examining how incompatible priorities for land in the region — preservation of wetlands for wildlife and reclamation of wetlands for agriculture — played out over the course of the twentieth century.

“The Greatest Curse of the Race”: Eugenic Sterilization in Oregon, 1909-1983
by Mark A. Largent

Between 1917 and 1983, Oregon’s prison and mental health authorities sterilized about twenty-five hundred people. Eugenics was a popular reform movement that began in the United States around 1900 and reached its peak in the 1930s in most states. By applying knowledge from evolutionary biology and genetics to human reproduction, advocates of eugenics sought to replace the inefficiencies of natural selection with rational, controlled reproduction that would speed along social progress by eliminating unfit citizens or undesirable traits from a given population. They placed a premium on the greater good of the community at the expense of individual human rights, justifying their actions on the basis of the benefit to future generations. Historian Mark Largent looks at how various social, scientific, and political influences combined to bring about the coerced sterilization of thousands of Oregonians in the name of political and economic progress.

“This is Just the First Round”: Designating Wilderness in the Central Oregon Cascades, 1950-1964
by Kevin R. Marsh

In debates over the Horse Creek drainage on the western edge of what is now the Three Sisters Wilderness Area and over many similar sites throughout the Cascade Range, the values of wilderness, scientific investigation, clean water, and non-motorized recreation competed with resource extraction, timber management, developed recreation, and local jobs. In the wake of the small ripples caused by the debates over the Horse Creek drainage and the broader social and political change that occurred in the decades following World War II, the use and perception of national forest lands in the Oregon Cascades would be altered forever. Historian Kevin Marsh argues that by examining specific case studies, we can better see how wilderness reflects deep controversies among interest groups with very different, incompatible values for the resources on public lands.

Oregon Places
The Brooklyn Roundhouse
by Wayne Depperman with Richard H. Engeman

The Brooklyn Roundhouse in Southeast Portland, put into service in 1912 and taken out of service in 1956, witnessed the era of the steam locomotive and today holds three steam engines and other relics from the era. A small group of volunteers preserves these machines in the roundhouse, which is not open to the public but still stands in the former Southern Pacific yards. Wayne Depperman’s photographs of these preservation efforts, paired with historic photos from the OHS collections, offer a glimpse of the equipment, work, and workers of railroads in the early twentieth century

Research Files
Voices of Oregon: Twenty-Five Years of Professional Oral History at the Oregon Historical Society
by Donna Sinclair and Peter Kopp

The Oregon Historical Society established an oral history program in 1976. Since then, the society has collected more than eight thousand hours of taped interviews and sound recordings, making it the largest regional oral history collection between Alaska and California. The collection reflects the diversity of Oregonians, from business owners and politicians to radical elders and Columbia River dissenters to Japanese Americans, African Americans, and Latinos.

Affiliate Spotlight, edited by Richard H. Engeman Deschutes County Historical Society

Carl Abbott, Greater Portland: Urban Life and Landscape in the Pacific Northwest, reviewed by Carol A. O’Connor

John Fahey, Saving the Reservation: Joe Garry and the Battle to Be Indian, reviewed by Clifford E. Trafzer

William R. Long, A Tortured History: The Story of Capital Punishment in Oregon, reviewed by Gordon Morris Bakken

David Igler, Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850-1929, reviewed by R. Douglas Hurt

John Phillip Reid, Patterns of Vengeance: Crosscultural Homicide in the North American Fur Trade, reviewed by Daniel P. Marshall

Durwood Ball, Army Regulars on the Western Frontier, 1848-1861, reviewed by G. Thomas Edwards Robert Ruby and John A. Brown, Esther Ross, Stillaguamish Champion, reviewed by Roberta Ulrich

Bill McLennan and Karen Duffeck, The Transforming Image: Painted Arts of the Northwest Coast First Nations, reviewed by Jay Miller

James T. Connelly, A Century of Teaching, Faith, and Service: The University of Portland, 1901-2001, reviewed by Rick Reed

Carsten Lien, compiler, Exploring the Olympic Mountains: Accounts of the Earliest Expeditions, 1878-1890, reviewed by Fred Beckey

T. Louise Freeman-Toole, Standing Up to the Rock, reviewed by Karl Brooks

Jo Fraser Jones, editor, Hobnobbing with a Countess and Other Okanagan Adventures: The Diaries of Alice Barrett Parke, 1891-1900, reviewed by Jana Harris