And did something then happen — perhaps the 300-year Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake and tsunami — to close off the mouth of its bay and crush its walls into heaps of rubble and cover them with soil, leaving only a handful of odd-looking mounds and a string of legends to mark what once had been? Legends, perhaps, of a golden city trimmed with turquoise, passed back and forth among its survivors’ descendants until the chance came to use them to lead a gang of rapacious steel-clad Spanish thugs astray?

This is all pure speculation, of course — more, it’s romantic tale-spinning of the kind one usually finds in pulp-fiction magazine stories about Atlantis and Lemuria. But there is a wisp of supporting evidence for such a theory (PORT ORFORD, CURRY COUNTY, 1540) (For text and pictures, see http://offbeatoregon.com/1802d.legendary-city-of-quivira-on-oregon-coast-484.html)

... a few years later, he pardoned the marshal, who'd been busted for gunfighting. (Harney City, Harney County; 1912) (For text and pictures, see http://offbeatoregon.com/o1107e-drinks-on-prohibitionist-governor-west-in-town-marshals-saloon.html)

... a vessel would slip out of the icy grip of the bar to sail on. Here are a few such stories. (Columbia River Bar, Clatsop County; 1880s) (For text and pictures, see http://offbeatoregon.com/1508c.escape-from-columbia-bar-352.html)

... founder of the Sagebrush Symphony. (Burns, Harney County; 1912) (For text and pictures, see http://offbeatoregon.com/o1108c-sagebrush-symphony-first-youth-orchestra-in-us.html)

So when the rest of the West Coast needed them, Oregon's "midnight entrepreneurs" were ready to roll. (Eastern Oregon; 1910s) (For text and pictures, see http://offbeatoregon.com/1308a-rumrunners-moonshiners-and-speakeasies.html)

The language barrier was high enough to make it very hard to assimilate. Towns and cities started passing “sundown laws” requiring Chinese residents to be off the streets at nightfall. The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, and then renewed.

By the mid-1880s the Chinese residents of Oregon all knew the justice system was virtually rigged against them. They could be robbed, beaten, or even murdered, without the perpetrators ever being held to account, if those perpetrators were European-Americans. They were, in other words, on their own.

So the frontier Chinese Oregonians did what any sensible group of people would do under the circumstances: They mobbed up.

That is, of course, oversimplifying things a bit. But the similarities between a Chinese tong and a Sicilian mafia family are notable.

The tongs, or “highbinder societies” as they were also called, were something like what you might get if the Crips merged with the International Order of Odd Fellows: a fraternal association based on family connections both natural and adoptive, with fierce loyalty and sometimes a disturbing willingness to spill blood.

And by 1886, that had happened often enough that the dime novels of the day were already entertaining their young readers with gripping stories of “tong wars” and “white slavery.”

In Portland, though, one didn’t have to be a regular Old King Brady reader to know something about “tong wars” ... (Portland, Multnomah County; 1890s) (For text and pictures, see http://offbeatoregon.com/1802c.tong-war-in-portland-averted-with-hanging-483.html)

... we know almost nothing of his life. (Near Danner, Malheur County; 1866) (For text and pictures, see http://offbeatoregon.com/o1107d-life-of-sacagaweas-mountain-man-son-charbonneau-tantalizing-mystery.html

)

... hoping to deny the Japanese knowledge of their “victory,” the newspapers kept it quiet. (Bly, Klamath County; 1945) (For text and pictures, see http://offbeatoregon.com/1508b.bly-balloon-bombing.351.html)

... although the genre of Bigfoot Stories is vast and growing every year - just a list of them, from 1945 to present, would be longer than this article - Bigfoot is neither the only Oregon cryptid, nor the most plausible. There are others. And chief among those others is the Columbia Bar Sea Serpent. (Clatsop and Tillamook counties; 1930s) (For text and pictures, see http://offbeatoregon.com/20-02.columbia-river-bar-sea-serpent-colossal-claude.html)

In Portland, shady underworld characters supplied Oregonians with plenty of both. (Clackamas and Multnomah counties; 1950s) (For text and pictures, see http://offbeatoregon.com/1307d-pinball-wars-elkins-vs-teamsters.html)