Oregon Experience Online

Oregon Experience is a documentary film program about important people in Oregon history from the Oregon Public Broadcasting. And they have a website full of resources. Two dozen episodes are available to watch online, covering people such as Sam Hill, Abigail Scott Dunaway, and York. Not only are the videos online but for each program there are supplemental materials such as images, articles on related topics, time lines, and other resources. The programs are very good, with deep research and excellent production values. The site is well-designed and easy to navigate, and the video player delivers high-quality streaming video with an option for full-screen viewing. These half-hour videos would be great for classroom use.

There is room for improvement of the site. Given the potential classroom use it would be nice to see some teaching material here--guided questions, primary source excerpts, even lesson plans. It would be nice to be able to download the videos to play on a mobile viewer or show where an internet connection is not available. Some of the linked essays are from the Oregon Historical Quarterly and are behind a pay wall, you can't read them unless you are connected to a university that subscribes to the database. But having 24 excellent programs online is a great thing!

OHS Research Library to Close!

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Update: It turns out that the situation is not quite as bad as I thought. On another blog George L. Vogt, the Oregon Historical Society’s Executive Director, made this statement: "Please note that, contrary to many statements on blogs and in emails, the library is not closing forever. At the request of the staff, we closed it for a few weeks so that the departing staff could finish various projects and clear backlogs. We are reopening soon . . . "
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We knew things were bad at the Oregon Historical Society with the state slashing the budget, but it is worse than I thought. This message went out over an archives listserv today. It is from Megan K. Friedel an archivist at the Oregon Historical Society Research Library:

It is with great sadness that I write to share the news with you that, due to severe budget reductions, the Oregon Historical Society will be closing its Research Library beginning this Saturday, February 28th. The collections will no longer be open to the public, and all library positions will be eliminated beginning March 13th. A few positions will remain to handle orders for photo and film reproduction. It is not known at this time if or when the library will re-open and at what capacity. As many of you know, the OHS Research Library has the largest collection of archival documents relating to the history of Oregon, including its nationally-renowned photograph collection containing over 2.5 million historical photographs, more than 32,000 books, 25,000 maps, 12,000 linear feet of manuscripts, 3,000 serials titles, 16,000 reels of newspaper microfilm, 8.5 million feet of film and videotape, and 10,000 oral history tapes. I feel this not only as a very personal loss but as a great loss to all Oregonians. If you have questions or concerns about the OHS Research Library closure, I strongly recommend that you contact our Executive Director, George Vogt, at george.vogt@ohs.org. Please continue to check our website at http://www.ohs.org for any future news about the status of the library . . . I have enjoyed working with all of you over the years and will greatly miss the experience of sharing our beautiful photo collections with so many appreciative colleagues and researchers.

I don't know what to say about this horrible news. It is truly a loss not just to Oregonians but to anyone interested in the history and culture of the Pacific Northwest. My heart goes out to those who are losing their jobs and to their families.

The United States Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842

The United States Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 is a Smithsonian Institution Libraries Digital Collection of interest to historians of the northwest. (You can see additional digital collections here.)

The four-year expedition to explore and document the Pacific Ocean was by far the grandest (and most expensive) scientific endeavor undertaken by the United States government before the Civil War. This map of the expedition's route gives a sense of the scale of the project. Another way to explore the expedition geographically is to look at the "About this Book" page on Google Books Search to see a map of all the place names mentioned:

But back to the Smithsonian digital exhibit. The site has the full text of the expedition narrative and all the scientific reports, as one would expect. There are also a series of very good essays, commissioned for the project, led off by an excerpt from Nathaniel Philbrick's book Sea of Glory: America's Voyage of Discovery - The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842. There are also some excellent supplemental materials, including rosters of the crew of each vessel and a very sophisticated searchable database of "Cultural Artifacts Collected During the U.S. Exploring Expedition." The wonderful illustrations from the reports are in another searchable database and available in extremely high quality downloads. The illustration below is of "A Kalapaya lad. A native of Oregon."


This website is a nice example of a focused digital presentation that takes a very well-know set of primary sources and makes them searchable and useable in new ways, while linking the sources to other resources such as the cultural artifacts database.

Echoes of Oregon History Learning Guide

The Oregon State Archives has a neat set of primary documents for teachers: the Echoes of Oregon History Learning Guide. The focus here is on short, exciting primary documents from the early history of Oregon. We get the text of each document, a high-quality scan, a paragraph or two putting the source in context and some questions relating to the document. For classroom teachers these are ready to go. Among the goodies are an 1858 Divorce petition, an 1857 Request to open Indian lands, and the 1854 Petition for Thomas family to stay in Oregon (they were a black family threatened with expulsion by Oregon's racist exclusion laws). My favorite document here is this 1851 Defendant's request, Whitman massacre trial:

The United States vs Telokite et al

Telokite one of the defendants makes oath that a certain Indian named Quishem now in the Cayuse country he thinks will be a material witness for the defendants in this case. That the materiality of said witness was not known in time to have him in attendance at this term of the court. He expects & believes that said witness will prove that the late Dr Whitman administered medi-cines to may of the Cayuse Indians and that afterwards a large number of them died, including amongst them the wives and children of some of these defendants. He expects further to prove by said witness that a certain Joseph Lewis, who resided at Waiilatpu informed these defendants a few days before the 29 November 1847 that the Cayuse Indians were dying in consequence of poison being administered to them by the late Marcus Whitman and he had heard Dr. Whitman say that he would kill off all of the Cayuse Indians by the coming of the ensuing spring-that he would then have their horses and lands. Witness will also prove it is the law of the Cayuse Indians to kill bad medicine men.

This is a rare glimpse into the legal system of the native inhabitants of the region and how they understood the Whitman tragedy. Of course it hardly need to be said that the request was denied. Here is the trial verdict.

Seriously Ancient Sh*t

Evidence Supports Earlier Date for People in North America - New York Times: "Exploring Paisley Caves in the Cascade Range of Oregon, archaeologists have found a scattering of human coprolites, or fossil feces. The specimens preserved 14,000-year-old human protein and DNA, which the discoverers said was the strongest evidence yet of the earliest people living in North America." See also this Paisley Caves description from University of Oregon.

NPR: Eroded Oregon Coast Yields Once-Sunken Surprises

NPR: Eroded Oregon Coast Yields Once-Sunken Surprises: "Shipwrecks, ghost forests of tree stumps thousands of years old and brilliant red formations have all been uncovered this winter along the Oregon coast after severe storms led to massive erosion."

It seems as if this winter's storms have severely eroded sections of the Oregon Coast, revealing not only ancient stumps but shipwrecks and even some Civil War-era cannons:

“She didn’t even like bird poop on her car”

From the New York Times: Terrible Tillie, Where the Departed Rest Not Quite in Peace. "Terrible Tilly" was the nickname for the lighthouse on Tillamook Rock off the Oregon coast. The lighthouse was built on a battered chunk of rock in the 1880s to warn ships as they approached the entrance of the Columbia River. Though ever-so-picturesque, the lighthouse was expensive and dangerous to maintain and was decommissioned in 1957.

So what do you do with an abandoned lighthouse? Terrible Tilly went through a variety of hands until purchased in 1980 by Eternity At Sea Columbarium, a business venture that turned Tilly into a scenic final resting place where folks could pay up to $2500 to have their ashes stored for all eternity.

Or until the outfit goes broke--as Eternity At Sea Columbarium seems to have done. Today Tillie's roof is leaking, some of the funeral urns are missing, and the lighthouse is apparently full of bird poop. That and dead people.