Entrepreneurs figured out how to send power long distances for the first time in history; later, after a flood wiped out power station, they pioneered alternating-current transmission. (Oregon City, Clackamas County; 1880s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1201a-oregon-city-home-of-worlds-first-power-grid.html)

By 1899, when Samuel L. Simpson’s drinking problem finally got around to killing him, he was essentially Oregon’s poet laureate — the Stewart Holbrook of the 1800s.

But thirty years earlier, he was just another fresh-faced lawyer, just out of Willamette University’s law school. He’d moved to Portland to open his practice, and now he was sitting at his desk in his brand-new office in Portland, sipping a glass of rye and waiting for his first client to walk in the door.

No one did. There were just too many lawyers in Portland in 1868. Fresh out of law school, with no social connections, Sam just didn’t have a chance.

But finally the door did open, and somebody stepped inside.

It wasn’t a client, though. It was one of the other residents in the boardinghouse he was staying in, a greenhorn from Chicago named Ted Harper. And Harper had a proposition: He wanted Sam to close up his law office and come to Southern Oregon with him. They would spend the summer hunting for a certain ruined cabin with an immense hoard of gold buried inside, deep in the wilderness south of Jacksonville, in a hidden valley boxed in by steep cliffs.

Only problem was, Harper didn’t know exactly where the valley was. It was possible that they’d search all summer and get nothing for their pains.

But Harper did have a letter giving partial directions to the cabin, which his cousin — who'd built the cabin and buried the gold — had dropped dead in the middle of writing.

Simpson agreed to the scheme. He was brand new in the law business, had no clients and very few prospects; a summer in the woods, a possible fortune – sure, why not? (Siskiyou Mountains, Josephine County; 1860s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/20-05b.sam-simpson-lost-cabin-gold.html)

One of the most interesting and colorful Lost Cabin Gold Mine stories is the one told by frontier poet Sam Simpson, which supposedly took place in the hills south of Jacksonville in 1853. In this case, it’s not a mine that’s been lost — it’s a vault: a small stone-lined crypt stuffed with millions of dollars’ worth of freshly dug gold, and guarded by whatever remains of the skeletons of two long-dead men. (Siskiyou Mountains, Jackson County; 1853) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/20-05.sam-simpson-lost-cabin-gold.html)

SOMETIME IN MID-1956, Corinne Gunderson Stumbo of Wolf Creek opened her mail and found a bill from Douglas County for delinquent property taxes.

It was only $1.50, but Corinne was a detail person. It bothered her that this had been overlooked.

It bothered her more when she figured out what the bill was for. It was several years’ taxes on a small strip of her family’s land that the Oregon Highway Department had built Highway 99 on, eight years earlier.

It seemed the state of Oregon, when it had moved the highway to its current location, hadn’t bothered to buy the land first.... (Wolf Creek, Douglas County; 1950s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/2502a.stumbo-stand-vs-bureaucrats-687.514.html)

After the rumrunner ship Pescawah responded to an S.O.S. from a sinking steam schooner, the Coast Guard pounced, arresting the crew and rewarding their heroism with prison sentences. (Offshore, Clatsop County; 1920s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1808c.pescawah-rumrunner-rescuers-509.html)

The Frishkorn family lived with two boarders, who paid the rent in exchange for board. Then they found out the boarders expected something else, too ... a fight broke out — and was ended by the roar of a double-barreled shotgun. (Manhattan, Clatsop County; 1880s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1807e.girl-defended-her-family-with-a-shotgun-506.html)

A poorly engineered jetty was installed at the mouth of Tillamook Bay that changed the ocean’s currents, and over the following three decades the sea relentlessly scoured away the town. Today, no trace remains of once-thriving Bayocean. (Bayocean Spit, Tillamook County; 1910s, 1920s, 1930s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1611b.bayocean-town-swallowed-by-the-sea-417.html)

A startup newspaper in Albany was determined to see Mattie Allison hanged, one way or another; and the townspeople were mostly convinced. But when her court case got started, the real story came out (Albany, Linn County; 1880s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1803b.campbell-the-stalker-murdered-in-albany.486.html)

FAR AWAY FROM the Beaver State, in the backcountry of West Virginia by the Kentucky border, a man named Floyd Hatfield was the proud owner of a fine razorback hog.

A distant neighbor, from across the Tug River on the Kentucky side, saw the hog one day, and claimed the hog was really his. He could tell, he said, by the distinctive notches in the hog’s ear.

Hatfield was enraged; the neighbor was basically calling him a thief, an insult that was, in the heart of Appalachia just after the Civil War, not to be borne.

The neighbor took Hatfield to court, suing for the return of the hog, and lost. But the Justice of the Peace was Anderson Hatfield, a relative of Floyd, and the neighbor was convinced the fix was in. Now the neighbor was enraged too.

That was in late 1878, and the dispute over the allegedly stolen hog blossomed out over the following 12 years into the most notorious family feud in U.S. history. The neighbor, as you have probably guessed by now, was named McCoy — Randolph McCoy.

The Hatfield-McCoy feud ended with more than a dozen members of both families being measured for coffins, and a decade or so of prosecutions for murder.

The stakes in the Lincoln City-Great Falls, Mont., feud, if it can be called that, are a lot less serious. In fact, the whole situation is the kind of thing that’s just fun and funny.

But the parallels are striking, and — now that nearly 150 years has passed since the last Hatfield-McCoy blood was spilled — amusing.... (Delake/Lincoln City, Lincoln County; 1940s, 1980s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/2412d1006b.d-river-short-river-long-drama_681.075.html)

Talking fast and dreaming big, M. Penn Phillips blew into Christmas Valley like a tornado. His dreams never came true, but he left an indelible impression on northern Lake County. (Christmas Valley, Lake County; 1960s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1808a.developer-penn-phillips-christmas-valley-dream-507.html)