(NOTE: This episode is being posted two days early just in case we lose connectivity in the forecasted thunder/hailstorm later today.) Today, as travelers outside the Beaver State’s borders know well, Oregon’s roads are merely average, or maybe slightly above average, in terms of crowdedness and quality. Certainly other states tend to have more and wider interstate freeways.

But you don’t have to go too far back into the past to find a time when Oregon’s highway system was something rather special.

It’s a legacy that goes all the way back to the dawn of motoring; when the Good Roads movement got started, it really took off in Oregon, starting in the early 1910s with the nationally famous Columbia Gorge Highway.

But the true reason for the lion’s share of Oregon’s transformation into a midcentury motorist’s paradise is much more prosaic:

Our state was the first in the nation to levy a gasoline tax to fund its highway system. (Forest Grove, Washington County; 1910s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/2402b-0905b.oregon-highways-gas-tax-025.635.html)

Wild with grief over the death of one daughter, and convinced he had seduced her other daughter, Caroline Briggs attacked schoolteacher John Dalmater in front of his class, shouting 'Shoot the son of a bitch' -- and her son, who'd accompanied her, did so.

This episode is being posted a day early just in case we lose connectivity in the forecasted thunder/hailstorm later today.

(Kerbyville, Josephine County; 1870s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1808b.caroline-and-david-briggs-UL-murder-508.html)

Printer George Himes saw the historical value of the everyday things around him, and although that made for some very unsuccessful publishing ventures, his collection is the heart of the Oregon Historical Society's archives today. (Portland, Multnomah County; 1870s, 1880s, 1890s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1512b.george-himes-history-hoarder.html)

Fourteen thousand years ago, in a cold dry cave deep in the “Oregon Outback,” someone answered a “call of Nature” — leaving behind a hefty load that, today, is the oldest evidence of human habitation on the West Coast. (Fort Rock, Lake County; 1839s, 2000s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1610a.prehistoric-oregon-sandals-coprolites-411.html)

ONE OF THE most significant events in the history of the world took place in 1892, when a corrupt political hack named James Lotan managed to land a cushy government job as the head of the customs inspection service for the Port of Portland.

Believe it or not, Lotan’s landing that job led directly to Pearl Harbor and eventually Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and indirectly to the defeat of Nazi Germany in Europe.

Not bad for a small-time white-collar criminal in a tiny backwater seaport town on the far side of the world, eh?

I realize you may be a bit skeptical of this claim. Bear with me while I unpack it and prove it to you, along with the strong possibility that most of us owe our lives and the continued existence of human civilization to James Lotan and the sleazy little band of well-heeled drug smugglers and human traffickers who worked with and for him, on the Portland waterfront in the early 1890s.... (Portland, Multnomah County; 1890s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/2408a-1202d.james-lotan-opium-king-661.161.html)

THE TOWN OF Long Creek developed in the late 1870s and early 1880s on the banks of Long Creek, one of the tributaries of the John Day River. It was, and is, a little north of the center of Grant County, a few dozen miles north-northwest of John Day and Canyon City. It was a prosperous little town, well positioned, and it grew relatively quickly to become one of the most promising settlements in Grant County, so much so that in 1891 the residents incorporated the town and started the process of trying to take over from then-fading Canyon City as county seat.

But before anything could come of that, the town got flattened by the most intense cyclone in recorded Oregon history.

And yeah, about that cyclone: One of the people who watched it descend upon the town gave what may actually be the earliest known eyewitness description of the creation of a “bomb cyclone.” ... (Long Creek, Grant County; 1890s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/2412e.long-creek-bomb-cyclone_682.511.html)

For centuries, mysterious chunks of beeswax have been washing up on Oregon beaches. Scholars have finally learned, with about 99 percent certainty, that the ship it's coming from was the San Cristo de Burgos, a Spanish galleon that disappeared in 1693. (Nehalem Spit, Clatsop County; 1600s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1807d.beeswax-wreck-mystery-solved-505.html)

Passengers on the speeding liner said an incompetent crew and disappearing ship's officers contributed to a shocking death toll after the liner Alaska crashed onto the rocks in the fog; the captain blamed an “uncharted current.” (Portland, Multnomah County; 1920s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1512a.alaska-shipwreck-368.html)

Taken to Ocean Park after being nearly killed in the wreck of the Glenmorag, William Begg was nursed back to health by Maude Taylor - who turned out to be the love of his life. (Columbia River Bar, Clatsop County; 1890s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1804b.william-begg-lucky-shipwreck-glenmorag-490.html)

Back before World War II, when racism was still a mainstream attitude with little or no social stigma attached, Portland was not a very friendly town for Black people.

It’s not that way any more, of course. There’s still racism; but the toxic race-hierarchalism that winked at lynchings and enabled the rise of the Ku Klux Klan — that, thankfully, is a distant and uncomfortable memory today.

And one has to wonder how much of that transformation — not just in Portland, but around the nation — can be attributed to the influence of one man, a man still today widely known as “The World’s Greatest Entertainer”: Sammy Davis, Jr.

Davis came to Portland with his dance group, the Will Mastin Trio — composed of Davis, his father, and his father’s best friend, Will Mastin — just after the Second World War. For a little while he was a regular in P-town’s clubs and Vaudeville theaters. ... (Portland, Multnomah County; 1940s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/2404d-1111d.sammy-davis-jr-portland-story-149.646.html)