John Creed Conn died in Southeastern Oregon in 1904 during a fight over grazing lands between cattlemen and sheep herders. The question is whether it was suicide or murder? Conn owned a store in Silver Lake that sold ammunition to cattlemen who had been raiding large herds of sheep in Christmas Valley.

Jackson County, Ore., had more than 100 school districts in the 1920s, most consisting of a single one-room school for grade one through eight. One of them was in Climax, an isolated community with just a few families living behind Roxy Ann Peak.

In 1853, Rachel Taylor left Illinois with her family, traveling to the Rogue Valley in what became known as the “Preacher Train” because five Southern Oregon preachers came on that same wagon train.

One of Southern Oregon’s outstanding teachers, Mae Beatrice Richardson, maiden name Nealon, was born near the Table Rocks in 1884 and lived and worked her entire life in Jackson County.

The rancher and co-author of the book titled The Oregon Desert , Reub Long, contributed some folksy humor about the lack of water on Southeastern Oregon’s high desert.

Here’s a tall tale from Curry County recounted by Bill Wallace for the Curry Historical Society. It goes like this:

Today’s shoppers wheel carts through stores and head for the cash register. It wasn’t always that way in Southern Oregon.

In the early 1960s two men decided that Oregon was in need of an outdoor music festival.

When Robert Erway Sr. returned as an adult to the Fall Creek Power House where he played as a 6-year-old, it brought back memories, not all happy ones.

Brownsboro, Ore., rancher Floyd Charley has been described as “the patriarch of 4-H, who like a pebble in the center of a pond, caused a huge ripple effect through Jackson County.”