Bad Ideas and Horrible People of Old Oregon

Shanghaiers ... weird cults ... dumb criminals and clumsy power grabbers ...

Since 2008 the Offbeat Oregon History syndicated newspaper column has entertained and informed Oregonians with the weirdest, quirkiest, funniest, and most outrageous true stories in the surprisingly long history of their young state.

Now, for the first time, those stories have been collected together, re-researched, augmented with freshly discovered information, and presented to readers in book form!

This is Volume 3, in which you'll find a collection of the worst ideas ever tried - ideas like ...

... using dynamite to get rid of a beached whale ...

... leaving a wife and family to start a "free love health cult" in Honduras ...

... making a cable tram service out of logging parts and a couple of city buses ...

... passing a law stripping brides of their citizenship at the altar ...

... selling milk out of the same buckets you use to slop the hogs ...

... try to take a skunk pelt using your bare hands ...

... build a sternweel riverboat powered by cows ...

... build a monument at the county courthouse honoring a mass murderer ...

... and 37 more!

You'll also find some of the most certifiably horrible characters in any state, ranging from "lovably horrible" characters like Old Joe Huddlestun, the grumpy neighbor who blew up his local schoolhouse with dynamite because the kids were too loud at recess, to seriously awful characters like ex-Governor Charles Martin, who, as an Army general after World War I, supervised the deliberate and systematic breaking of the spirit of an entire divisional cohort of returning war heroes.

Not to mention ...

... Luther Powell, Oregon's top leader of the multi-level marketing version of the Ku Klux Klan ...

... Greenberry Smith, the pioneer who stole his neighbor's land from his wife and kids after he died ...

... the DeAutremont Brothers, history's most incompetent but deadly train robbers ...

... "Bud" Thompson, prickly Southern newspaper editor, who escalated a feud with another paper to a gunfight ...

... L.G. Carpenter, the shyster lawyer who tried to steal a neighbor's land by having him shanghaied ...

... Larry Sullivan, godfather of Portland shanghaiers and later mining-stock swindler ...

... "Ma Anand" Sheela Silverman, architect of the biggest domestic biological-warfare attack in U.S. history ...

You'll find a total of 62 of them in this 468-page book, along with more than 100 vintage photographs, newspaper clippings, and other pieces of art.