Oregon Digital Newspaper Program

King Con: The Bizarre Adventures of the Jazz Age’s Greatest Impostor will be released on August 7th! Read more about the Oregon connections author Paul Willetts discovered while researching below:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Can you tell us a little about your publication and yourself?

I’m a U.K.-based writer of nonfiction, most of which has focused on true stories set against a twentieth-century London backdrop. Probably the best-known of these in my home country was a book called Members Only, which has adapted into The Look of Love, a lavish and quite stylish movie starring Steve Coogan.

My books are often described as “novelistic.” Without embellishing the verifiable facts of a story, I try to shape my research into a dramatic narrative that conveys a strong sense of place, character, and period. I suppose I’m instinctively drawn to tragi-comic stories, to stories that give us an insight into the wider society in which they took place. That’s certainly true of my latest book, King Con: The Bizarre Adventures of the Jazz Age’s Greatest Impostor—which is the first of my books to be published in the U.S.A. Spanning the period between 1917 and 1929, it’s about Edgar Laplante, a handsome and extraordinarily charismatic Rhode Island-born vaudeville singer and con-man, who was a bit like a cross between Jay Gatsby and Tom Ripley (with a dash of David Bowie’s blurred sexuality and shapeshifting theatricality).

In search of attention and acclaim, Laplante reinvents himself as Chief White Elk, leader of the Cherokee nation. He ends up traveling to Europe to meet the British king. While he’s there, he captivates a pair of fabulously rich Austrian countesses who bankroll his “royal tour” of fascist Italy, where he becomes a darling of Mussolini’s regime, routinely greeted by thousands of adoring fans.

But this isn’t a straightforward con-trick story. Over just a few months, Laplante gives away his ill-gotten-gains—equivalent to as much as $58 million in 2018 currency!

What interested you in this topic?

Absolutely everything—the period; the intriguing and very strange personality of the man at the center of it; the various settings, which range from First World War-era America to 1920s Paris and the French Riviera. Immediately I came across the Edgar Laplante saga, I knew I had the ingredients of a book that’d generate a good advance from a U.S. publisher and that would, more to the point, be fun to research and write. Edgar Laplante’s often absurd antics certainly kept me entertained.

At that time I was keen to find a specifically American story and use that as a means to switch to a U.S. publisher, partly because your country has a stronger tradition of novelistic nonfiction, and partly because I love American books. Not just the contents, but the way they’re designed and produced. To me, they always feel far superior to their British counterparts.

One of the lovely things about writing nonfiction is that you learn so much when you’re working on it. As with my previous books, I’ve gone to great lengths to comprehend the world within which my protagonist pulled his various cons. Understanding the nature of communications between cities at that time was key to understanding how an impostor like him could keep conning people and then just moving on to another city.

What resources did you use for your research?

I drew on a vast amount of material that generated about half-a-million words of notes. The central thread of the story relied upon old files from Scotland Yard and the Bureau of Investigation (the precursor of the F.B.I.); letters held at Washington State University; a smattering of obscure memoirs; along with a staggering number of newspaper and magazine stories published in America, Canada, Belgium, France, Italy, Switzerland, and the U.K. I was pleasantly surprised at how these enabled me to put together such a detailed portrait of the life of someone so transient.

For my depiction of the countless places through which Laplante moved, I used vintage travel guides, newspapers, photo archives, architectural floorplans, and the work of recent historians. I have, of course, done my best to synthesize this into a book that aspires to be as readable and entertaining as possible. Whether I’ve succeeded, though, isn’t for me to say…

What did you use in Historic Oregon Newspapers online? How did you use the site and which titles were useful to you?

I mainly used your digital newspaper collection, which features eight stories about Laplante, a.k.a. Chief White Elk. These appeared in publications such as The Morning Oregonian between 1918 and 1920 when he made two forays into Oregon with his first wife—a genuine Native American, who is herself a fascinating character. Born Burtha Thompson, she was a bright and beautiful proto-feminist who styled herself Princess Ah-Tra-Au-Saun. That’s a name familiar to people who are interested in the pioneers of American photography, because she repeatedly modelled for the great portraitist, Emma Belle Freeman. But I digress…

Getting back to your original questions, your digital archive renders the research process much, much easier than it used to be. Paradoxically, this sort of digital technology makes it possible for writers like me to evoke the pre-digital world. For instance, I routinely use word-searches in order to obtain information about such things as weather, specific streets, and sartorial fashions. The only trouble is, such textural detail tend to lead misguided readers to assume I’m fictionalising the past.

Where can we purchase/access your book?

It’ll be available through Barnes & Noble and independent bookshops, as well as websites such as Amazon and Indiebound.

What’s your next project? I’ve just put together a proposal for a new book, though I haven’t yet shown it to either my U.S. or British agents. It’s for what could be described as a nonfiction thriller—a label that is, I know, frequently applied to books that are less than thrilling. Well, I hope this’ll buck the trend. Like King Con, it focuses on a bizarre and dramatic story that hasn’t, astonishingly, generated masses of previous books.

For more information about Paul and his work, visit www.paulwilletts.com.

 

John Riha, Ashland-based author, discusses the historically-rooted inspiration for his latest novel!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Can you tell us about your book?

The Bounty Huntress is an historical novel set in southern Oregon in the early part of the 20th century. It tells the fictionalized story of Iris Greenlee, Oregon’s first female bounty hunter. Iris is a young farm girl from the Applegate Valley whose father—a game warden in Jackson County—is murdered when she is very young. She grows up tough and rough-hewn, and learns many practical survival skills, including hunting deer in the nearby mountains. When she and her small family—her widowed mother and autistic brother—are nearly overwhelmed with setbacks, indignities, and the threat of the loss of the family farm, Iris is determined to make money by using her backwoods knowledge: She’ll hunt wanted criminals for money.

Tell us about yourself.

I’m a longtime media executive from the Midwest with a professional history that includes writing and editing for many national publications. I was the Executive Editor of Better Homes and Gardens and the Editorial Director for Meredith Corporation’s Special Interest Media, a group of more than 120 magazines and seven websites. After raising our two boys in Iowa, my wife and I decided to move back to the West, to Ashland, where we had met in 1984. I now freelance write and edit for national magazines and websites, and I’m slowly turning my career toward writing books, especially historical fiction and humor.

What interested you in this topic?

The part of the story about the murdered game warden is true. I ran across one of those “100 Years Ago Today” articles in the Medford Mail Tribune about the crime, and I became intrigued. I was especially interested in the fact that the murderer was acquitted in a raucous trial, even though there was a reliable eyewitness to the crime. Also of interest was the fact that the warden had two small children at the time of his death—a four-year-old girl and two-year-old boy. Add to that the fact that the accused murderer himself was murdered 16 years later in an unsolved crime. I began to wonder, “What if those kids grew up and took their revenge?” That classic revenge theme was the genesis for the novel. The part about Iris Greenlee becoming a bounty huntress is fiction.

What resources did you use for your research?

The archives available through Historic Oregon Newspapers online were invaluable. In researching the murder, I was able to follow the crime from the shooting all the way through the trial in great detail. Many small observations and nuances noted in the historical articles were a great help in adding color and authenticity to the novel. I was able to corroborate facts in other local newspaper accounts and the Oregonian. Other period articles and even advertisements were extremely valuable in setting the tone and creating language appropriate to the period. I also spent many hours at the Southern Oregon Historical Society Library in Medford, researching details such as the construction and floor plans of the county jail and courthouse in Jacksonville, and viewing historic photos depicting the towns and rural locations of Jackson County.

Where can we purchase/access your book?

The Bounty Huntress is available through Amazon and any book store can order copies. Locally, it’s at Bloomsbury Books in Ashland, rebel heart books in Jacksonville, and Reader’s Guide Books in Salem.

What’s your next project?

Travelling along the coast last year we stopped at the Coast Guard Lifeboat Station in Port Orford. Although it’s decommissioned now, they had an extremely treacherous and dramatic launch point for rescue operations in the 1930s. That definitely got me thinking, so we’ll see if that manifests into another book.

 

Today’s guest blog post comes from Elizabeth Peterson, M.A., M.L.I.S., Humanities Librarian and Curator of Moving Images here at UO Libraries:

When the Oregon Digital Newspaper Project launched several years ago, I immediately saw its potential for researching local movie history. I am the subject specialist librarian for cinema studies, and I recently completed a second master’s degree in film studies. As part of my degree program, I did an independent study project on movie theaters in Eugene and Springfield during the nickelodeon era (1905-1919), which I turned into a website and an article in Oregon Historical Quarterly. My research could have been done using the microfilm of the local newspapers, but I definitely couldn’t have made anywhere near as much progress in a 10-week term as I did using the digitized newspapers. The ability to do keyword searching across multiple years of issues also allows for detecting larger patterns and trends over time, something that is much more time-consuming and labor-intensive with analog materials.

This nickelodeon period is named for the type of theaters that were common in the early days of commercial cinema, which were often small, storefront venues with fewer than 200 seats. Admission was often five cents, thus the name “nickelodeon.” Much of the scholarly research about this period of film history has been about large urban areas such as New York City, so many of our assumptions about theaters, audiences, and the experience of movie-going have come from this research. Although more research has started to focus on rural areas and small towns, very little has been written about Oregon, and nothing about towns outside of Portland. I wanted to see how these issues played out in two small neighboring cities in Oregon. How would local film histories align and diverge from the dominant histories of film exhibition?

The quantity of data presented by ODNP is pretty overwhelming, so I’ve only just started to document pieces of that question. The Bell Theatre in Springfield is part of that story, and the two Springfield newspapers in ODNP were essential to help me to begin to understand it. The Lane County News and Springfield News ran regular ads and news stories that tell some of the history of the Bell Theatre, including its ownership, programming, admission prices, promotional strategies, and even the names of the high school girls who were hired to play the piano to accompany the silent movies. The Bell opened on Main Street in 1912. It wasn’t the first theater to show moving pictures in the town, but it was a fixture of downtown and Springfield leisure activities for over two decades. Like many theaters during this era, movies were part of a variety of programming that could include vaudeville, live music, dance performances, minstrel shows, and live theater. This ad from 1915 promoted a Hawaiian singing group in addition to movies.

The Lane County News collaborated with the Bell Theatre to feature a serialized story with a movie tie-in. “The New Adventures of J. Rufus Wallingford“ ran as a weekly story in the newspaper, while audiences could “see this story picturized” several times a week at the Bell.

This was a common practice to increase both newspaper readership and to sell movie tickets to audiences eager to see the next installment of the story. Thanks to the Oregon Digital Newspaper Project, we can see that “The New Adventures of J. Rufus Wallingford” appeared in newspapers and movie theaters all over Oregon including Portland, Pendleton, Bandon, and Grants Pass. These are the kinds of connections and trends that one can see easily in a digital database that would have been very difficult in the past.

Newspapers can tell us how movie theaters were situated within the cultural, economic, and social life of communities. The Bell served as a kind of community center, hosting lectures, political meetings, and fundraisers for local causes, such as an event for the Red Cross during World War I. It also hosted a presentation from the Oregon Social Hygiene society, for which the attendance gives a clue as to the number of seats in the theater. Three hundred men attended the lecture about the “four sex lies” and “what should be done in Springfield.”

 

These are just a few details from one theater in one town in Oregon. Clearly, there are many more details about Oregon film history and local movie-going that can be excavated from this rich database.

Dr. David Lewis shares with us how he uses Historic Oregon Newspapers online for his many research projects!

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Can you tell us a little about your research and yourself?

I am a researcher in ethnohistory. I received my PhD from the UO in 2009 from the Department of Anthropology. I spent a long time in my education, 1988-2009, from 1994-2009 at UO, and studied Native American history and culture nearly the whole time. I am a member of the Grand Ronde tribe, in fact Kalapuya, Chinook and Takelma, and planned a long time ago to help the tribe restore parts of its culture after its restoration in 1983. I was the Cultural manager for 8 years at Grand Ronde and now I am an educator and independent researcher.  I teach at local colleges and conduct contract work for tribes.

The blog grew out of my interest to producE more accurate histories about the tribes of western Oregon. I have been collecting primary documents for years and now I get to use them by finding interesting and unknown subjects in the documents that need to be told so we can understand the history of the tribes. I began this research with the SWORP project collection, which I helped gather and bring to the UO and organize for Special Collections. I continued with my work at Grand Ronde, helping develop and plan the museum and archives for the tribe, which opened in 2014. The blog now has more than 280 history essays on it. I find that through the blog I can produce history fast and get it out to the people who need it and will appreciate it quickly and efficiently. I am now working to rewrite a number of my essays into a publishable book form  called Tribal Stories of the Willamette Valley. I have a following of some 900 people on various social media and have gotten over 67,000 views on my blog from some 30,000 people throughout the world. There literally is nothing else like my blog for Oregon Native history. Most of my attention is paid to western Oregon, but have numerous essays about northern California and eastern Oregon as well. The other benefit to the blog is that I am creating curriculum for public schools and universities. I have gotten many comments from educators who are actually using the blog posts in many areas of Oregon.

What interested you in this topic?

Its really an untouched subject, through my research I have found most of the “histories of Oregon” have ignored native history entirely, and so I am literally writing Native people back into their history. It is my heritage as well and I have found that as an educator, its easier to make a connection with native students if they see themselves and their heritage reflected in the history they are reading. Its really unconscionable that in this day and age there is almost nothing taught about Oregon tribes in our public schools when there is so much information available. This leads to a complete lack of understanding of Native peoples by the majority of Oregonians, a situation I would like to help remedy.

What resources did you use for your research?

I have extensive ethnographic information from anthropology, folklore, linguistics, and history studies, as well as extensive government records at my disposal, from some 25 years of collection such records. As well the digital age we are in makes it easy to find older texts fully available online in numerous sites, for free. Sites like Google books, Google scholar, the Internet Archive, Hathitrust, Southern Oregon University  Digital Archives, and the Oregon Digital Newspaper Project make it easy and efficient to find the information I need to write my histories. I have become an expert in online research.

What did you use in Historic Oregon Newspapers online? How did you use the site and which titles were useful to you?

I generally peruse a placename or persons name as a search term and find that Newspapers like the Oregon Spectator, Daily Oregonian,and Willamette Farmer are very useful for finding great newspaper articles about the subjects I am interested in. As the number of newspapers grows the site becomes important in new ways and in new areas of Oregon. I wish that some of the holes in the major titles would be completed soon as well.

Where can we access your work?

My blog is at https://ndnhistoryresearch.com/, and I post my articles on a Facebook site, Oregon Indian Territory, https://www.facebook.com/theoregonterritory/,  which I manage also. I do not have a pay site I am working on a plan for this, but I do ask for donations to help me pay some of the annual blog fees.

What’s your next project?!

At this time I am working on gathering tribal stories of the Missoula floods so that I can understand the floods of 12,000 to 14,000 years ago, from different tribal perspectives. At the same time I am editing my stories for my forthcoming book Tribal Stories of the Willamette Valley. I am also a co-editor on a volume to collect together various studies about the Kalapuyans.

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Thank you, David! If you want to get in touch with David, please refer to his links and contact information below:

David G. Lewis, PhD | Ethnohistory Research, LLC

1118 Lancaster Dr. NE #343, Salem, Oregon 97301
dgl.coyotez@gmail.com

Cell: 541.514.3275

Anthropologist, Ethno-historian, Archivist, Educator
Adjunct Professor, Chemeketa Community College
Oregon Heritage Commission

WordPress Blog ndnhistoryresearch
LinkedIn David G Lewis
Academia.com  https://chemeketa.academia.edu/DavidLewis
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/coyotez
Google+ https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DavidLewisNDN/about

Karin Morey, historian of Oregon City and avid researcher, discusses her recent projects and publications about Oregon City’s floods, pioneers, and Army service men and women.

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Can you tell us a little about your publication(s) and yourself?

I have had an interest in Oregon City history for over 60 years, having grown up hearing the stories of the city’s history from Wilmer Gardner, one of the founders of the Clackamas County Historical Society. After retiring 15 years ago I was able to spend more time on research and to look for ways to share the city’s history.

       

What interested you in this/these topic(s)?

For several years I volunteered at the Museum of the Oregon Territory and was able to make use of the documents and photographs in their collection, as well as those maintained by the Clackamas County Family History Society. The first book I worked on was a reproduction of Wilmer Gardner’s “Old Oregon City” with minor corrections to his original text and new scans of the photographs he had chosen to illustrate the city’s history. With the help of Adrian Wegner, a volunteer who was very adept at scanning and bringing out the best in the photos from the 19th and early 20th century, we were able to reproduce the long out of print book. Our next project was an “Images of America” book for Arcadia Publishing  focusing on the various floods in Oregon City. Preparing the book involved researching newspapers from the 1840s through 1996 as well as other print sources and choosing photographs to go with the narrative of each major flood.

After leaving my volunteer position at the museum I began to focus my time on the Mountain View Cemetery, a city owned pioneer cemetery with burials dating back to 1848. I started a blog to share the stories of the early settlers of Oregon City and their descendants. In the process, I was asked by city staff to help identify Civil War veterans buried in the cemetery. A friend of mine had started this project and had located 80 veterans. Through further research in the Oregon City newspapers and online Civil War records I have been able to identify over 150 Civil War veterans in Mountain View Cemetery and am still discovering one ones while working through each burial lot in the old portions of the cemetery.

While learning more about these veterans, I noticed that many of them were members of the Oregon City Grand Army of the Republic Post, Meade Post No. 2. Knowing little about the G. A. R. I began to research the organization and to look for more information on our local Post. During the search I located the first two rosters of the Post mixed in with material from the Women’s Relief Corps, the women’s auxiliary of the G. A. R. Post. In comparing a previous transcription of the rosters I noticed several differences in the typed copy from what I had found so far on the veterans at Mountain View.

What resources did you use for your research?

Having the “modern amenities” of digitized newspapers, online genealogy sites and sites such as Find A Grave and Billion Graves, I was able to compare the original handwritten rosters to other sources to more easily decipher the spellings of their names and companies they served in as well as locating where almost all of the 400+ members of the Post were buried. This resulted in a book to help preserve the information from the rosters, Meade Post No. 2, G. A. R. The book includes information on each member as well as the activities of the Post, a great deal of which came from local newspapers.

What did you use in Historic Oregon Newspapers online? How did you use the site and which titles were useful to you?

The digitized newspapers from U of O have made it possible to do a large portion of my research from the comfort of home rather than long hours on microfilm readers at a local library or museum. The ability to search for a specific name or term instead of advancing frame by frame, reading every word on every page, has cut down my time by 100s of hours. In my research I have also found the newspapers from other cities very useful as families moved around the region, people died while out of town and were returned to Oregon City for burial, or if a copy of local paper is missing, the news may have been reprinted in another newspaper in the state. The digitized newspapers have made it possible to complete more in less time and are greatly appreciated!

Where can we purchase/access your book(s)?

All three books I have worked on are available through Amazon and other booksellers.

Purchases of the two Oregon City books benefit the Clackamas County Historical Society. The titles are:

Old Oregon City, by Wilmer Gardner
Oregon City Floods, Clackamas County Historical Society

My self-published book is Meade Post No. 2 G. A. R. by Karin D. Morey

To read my current blogs:

theweekthatwasoc.wordpress.com
livesfromthecemeteries.wordpress.com

Updates are also posted on the corresponding Facebook pages:

Weekly news blog: OCWeek
Cemetery stories: FriendsMountainViewCemetery

What’s your next project!

I am currently working on two projects. One is the municipal history of Oregon City, beginning with the elected and appointed officials for each year from 1844 through 1923 when the city changed from a Council to a Commission system. To make my research easier, I had transcribed the handwritten City Council minutes from 1850 through 1911 when they converted to typewritten minutes, which had then been shared with our City Recorder. In doing the transcriptions I found many facts about the city I had never seen in print and decided to further research the various municipal activities and compile them into a book for easier access. This is a work in progress and is greatly aided by access to the digitized newspapers from Oregon City when confirming elections and the text of city ordinances as well as the editorial content when the local newspaper editor was, or was not, in support of the direction the City Council was moving. The final book will list the city officers, a few of the “highlights” of the term, a sample of ordinances passed and a summary of major construction projects for each of the years.

The other project is a more organized summary of every burial, lot by lot, in the oldest portions of Mountain View Cemetery. This includes brief biographical information, whether the individual is a veteran and/or an Oregon Trail pioneer, occupational information and family relations in family lots. A large part of this research is done through obituaries and “social notes” in the digitized newspapers.

I also compile a weekly blog called “The Week That Was OC.” The blog is a selection of newspaper articles for the current week in each year ending in the same digit as the present year, such as 1848, 1858 etc. now that we are in 2018, from 1846 through 1922. It gives a little history, a little scandal and a little humor from the past of our city.

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Thank you for your contributions to the history of Oregon City, Karin! If you use Historic Oregon Newspapers online and would like to share your work with us, please contact us!