Drunken joyride ends in justice court

A garage employee who borrowed a car from his employer in October of 1916 ended up in jail with a companion after a drunken fracas that left three men injured and the car a wreck at the bottom of Wild Horse grade.

Harry Emory, an employee of the Independent Garage in Pendleton, borrowed a car from his employer early on Oct. 15, 1916, picking up companions Bert Mansfield, Orville Coffman, Ed Hayes, and a young man named Parrott for a jaunt through the countryside east of Pendleton. Several hours and much alcohol later, the carload of inebriated men rolled up to the Wyrick ranch just as the hired man, Joe Campbell, was hitching up a team to travel into town.

Emory was a former employee on the ranch, and stopped in to talk with Campbell. A rumpus started almost immediately, according to the ranch's hired men, because Emory and others in the car accused the ranch employees of absconding with Hays. Unbeknownst to Emory and his friends, Hayes and Parrott, tiring of the orgy of drinking and troublemaking, had set out on foot for town.

Emory and Mansfield burst into the ranch bunkhouse where William Painter and Walter Cole were still in bed. Cole, who suffered from rheumatism, wasn't able to defend himself and ended up badly beaten about the face.

Coffman finally convinced Emory and Mansfield to leave the ranch after they tried to break into the ranch house. On the drive back to Pendleton, Coffman was thrown from the car. As Emory and Mansfield reached the rocky grade at the entrance to the Wild Horse cut, Emory lost control of the car and rolled it down an embankment where it landed upside down. Both men were thrown from the vehicle but miraculously escaped injury.

They had just extricated themselves from the wreck when Sheriff Til Taylor arrived, having been called by Mrs. A.A. Kimball during the break-in attempt. Emory and Mansfield were arrested, and after driving several miles Sheriff Taylor also picked up Coffman, who was sitting on the side of the road with his face skinned up from his fall from the car.

Emory and Mansfield appeared before Justice of the Peace Parkes the following morning. Both pled guilty to the complaint lodged against them and paid a $50 fine in lieu of 25 days in jail.

Rejection results in murder-suicide

The tiny town of Echo was rocked by a murder-suicide in July of 1908 after a popular young woman of the town refused the affections of her grandfather's hired man.

Elsie Kenison, an 18-year-old recent graduate of Echo public school and a popular resident of the town, had been spending time in early July with B.R. Stoffel, a 24-year-old hired hand working for her grandfather, W.W. Whitworth, on the family farm. Rumor had it that Kenison told Stoffel she was not interested in pursuing a further relationship with him.

On July 23, 1908, at about 9:30 a.m., Kenison was in the house with an 8-year-old neighbor girl. Stoffel entered the bedroom where Kenison was working and shot her through the mouth with a .38 caliber pistol, the bullet passing through her body and out through the window screen into the yard. Kenison slumped to the floor across a chair and was dead within minutes.

Stoffel fled the house, tossing the pistol into a rocking chair on the front porch as he ran away across the low hills north of Echo. The neighbor girl, who was not in the room when the incident happened, entered the bedroom and saw Kenison on the floor. She ran to the barn to tell Kenison's grandfather about the shooting.

Within moments the neighbors had been notified, and a posse of about 40 men was organized by Marshal Hoggard of Echo to track Stoffel down. Stoffel had about 20 minutes' head start on the trackers, but Hoggard expected to run the suspected killer down without much trouble.

While the citizens of Echo were searching the sage brush-covered hills north of town, Stoffel circled around the foothills and returned to the Whitworth barn. Shortly before noon, two hours after killing Kenison, he hanged himself from a beam.

Several members of the posse had lingered behind to keep watch on the farm, and one happened to peek through a crack in the barn. He saw Stoffel's body and, thinking the murderer was holed up inside and heavily fortified, the man shot through the crack, hitting Stoffel's corpse. The defenders rushed into the barn to find they had shot a dead man.

Runners were sent to notify the posse of Stoffel's suicide. An order for bloodhounds from Walla Walla was canceled. Umatilla County Sheriff Til Taylor and a deputy had joined the chase, and called the county coroner to preside over the bodies. Letters found in Stoffel's pocket included one from Kenison, which told the man that she could not love him.

Umatilla: from boom to bust and back

The city of Umatilla, located at the confluence of the Umatilla and Columbia rivers in northeast Oregon, was once a boom town serving the throngs of people traveling from Portland to the gold fields of Idaho. Established as a transfer stop for miners and supplies from the river to the inland route in 1862, Umatilla Landing was first platted in 1863, just after the establishment of Umatilla County.

The town quickly grew to a population of 1,500-1,800 permanent residents, and as many or more transients moving along the Portland-Umatilla-Boise route, the shortest way to get supplies to the gold fields. Umatilla Landing from 1863-1867 featured trading stands, a drug store, hotels, dance halls, feed stables, barber shops, blacksmith shops and 22 saloons, along with many other stores. Six stores averaged sales of $200,000 a year, and about 95% of the payments were in gold dust.

By 1864 the town had a mayor, a marshal and a town council, and Umatilla was designated the county seat in 1865, when the first school was also built. A stage route established in 1864 hauled supplies from Umatilla to the foot of the Blue Mountains, and from there John Hailey and his partner William Ish took the goods by saddle train to Boise, serving 15,000 miners in the Boise area.

Chinese passing through the area also established a village two or three miles below Umatilla.

In the winter, when the Columbia River iced over, the permanent residents spent their days ice skating, playing games and practical jokes, dancing and waiting for the return of the steamboats. The first steamers to arrive each spring were packed so tightly with passengers that the officers and deck hands could barely get around to do their jobs.

The decline of Umatilla was as sudden as its expansion. Alternative routes to the gold fields were developed in 1866, and Umatilla's trade evaporated quickly. With the establishment of other, larger cities the county seat was moved to Pendleton in 1868. And when the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads linked in 1869, the Portland-Umatilla-Boise route traffic dried up. Umatilla's population dropped precipitously. 

Travel writer Theodor Kirchhoff stepped off the steamboat at Umatilla in 1872 to find the town he had known was gone. Instead of harness bells jingling while hundreds of muleteers' whips cracked, Kirchhoff witnessed the wind howling around empty buildings with shattered windows, blinding clouds of dust, sand flats and sagebrush, and a population of 100. "From the opposite shore of the river, a few miserable Indian tents glumly watch the city sink into ruin," Kirchhoff wrote in his account.

Today's Umatilla, however, has rebounded nicely. The construction of McNary Dam from 1947-1954 brought an influx of new residents, but it was the opening of Interstate 82 in the late 1980s that put the city back on the map. The growth of Hermiston to the east and the Port of Morrow to the west have helped reestablish Umatilla as a crossroads community along the Columbia.

The history of Umatilla County's first boom town was placed in the hands of a newly formed historical society in 1993. The Umatilla Museum, featuring 157 years of the city's ups and downs, is located at 911 Sixth St.

Hermiston man flies B-17 once more

Patrick Martin's hands wrapped around the wheel firmly, and his feet moved to familiar spots on the rudder pedals of the B-17G after climbing into the co-pilot's seat and buckling in on July 15, 1994. The 72-year-old quickly glanced over the gauges, then at the horizon again, his instincts taking over as the plane soared over Oregon's Coast Range.

He's 22 again, and it's April 11, 1944. Capt. Patrick A. Martin, United States Army Air Force, is on a final bombing run over Rostock, Germany, with the 335th Squadron, 95th Bomb Group, 8th Air Force. 

Martin was bounced out of the service in 1954 due to a reduction of forces, something for which he never forgave the Army Air Force. A La Grande native, Patrick settled in Hermiston after leaving the service and went to work for Union Pacific Railroad. He retired in 1986.

Martin was able to relive to his first professional love — flying — thanks to family friend Barbara Hansen. Martin's family wanted to get him in the air again after he was diagnosed in May of 1994 with inoperable cancer of the pancreas, and had decided with his wife Doris that he would forego chemotherapy and radiation treatments.

Hansen helped line up a B-17G owned by Evergreen Ventures Inc. that was scheduled to appear at the 1994 U.S. Bank Rose Festival Airshow in Hillsboro. Sue Petersen, the coordinator of the World War II planes for the show, called Martin and asked, "How would you like to fly in a B-17 again?"

Evergreen pilot Bill Maszala watched Martin's eyes as he took control of the plane. "You could tell he was back in time," Maszala said.

After 5 minutes at the stick, Martin banked the plane around on a gentle 180-degree turn and gave the seat back to co-pilot Greg Klein, then stood behind the seat and watched every move the pilots made until landing.

"It was more than everything I wanted it to be," Martin said, gazing at the plane once they were on the ground again. "It was just like something I'd done before. I recognized the feel of everything. My eyes went right to the gauges. I just know I could take it off and land it."

Patrick Martin died May 20, 1995, at the age of 73.

Pendleton man honored for burning car rescue

A Pendleton man received an award for heroism in June 1967 after he saved a man from a burning car the previous November.

Kirk Leuhrs of Pendleton was working for Boeing Co. in Seattle in November of 1966 and was driving to work when he came upon a traffic accident that left one car in flames. No one had attempted to rescue the driver of the burning car, which had been burning for two minutes by the time Leuhrs pulled over.

Leuhrs tore open the door of the small sedan and found the driver, John Pitcher, also a Boeing employee, wedged between the two front seats, with his head in the back seat and his legs in the front. His clothes were on fire.

The flames from the burning car singed Leuhrs' face and beard, and he shouted for help to extricate the man from the car. After removing Pitcher from the vehicle, Leuhrs laid him on the ground and patted out the flames on his clothes. While checking Pitcher for broken ribs and other injuries, and preparing to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, Pitcher began breathing on his own and the color returned to his face.

Leuhrs covered Pitcher with a blanket against shock and then continued on his way to work.

The rescue wasn't covered by the media, and Pitcher recovered from the accident. But a mention of the event was written up in Boeing's shop newsletter. Leuhrs was given a letter of commendation by the company.

After Leuhrs moved to Pendleton he was hired by the Hartford Insurance Group. The company awarded him the Hartford Heroism Award and an engraved plaque for his efforts to save his fellow employee.

Kirk Leuhrs of Pendleton, center, is awarded the Hartford Heroism Award by Bud Mabry of Pendleton, left, and Robert G. Hanks, Spokane, of the Hartford Insurance Group in June 1967.

Pendleton folks weigh in on 'ape-men of the Cascades'

A group of miners working in the Spirit Lake region of Washington's Cascade Mountains in July of 1924 told a story of giant seven-foot hairy men who drove them from their cabin with a bombardment of huge rocks. Pendleton-area folks took to the newspaper to weigh in on the veracity of their claims.

Joseph A. Dupuis was the first to have a theory on the "ape-men," as described by the miners. The Dupuis family arrived in the Pacific Northwest in 1859 via wagon train, and he said Vancouver, Washington, was a mighty tough town in those days. Dupuis described one particular man, a Native American more than six feet tall, with one eye, who was run out of town with his wife after several rounds of drinking, fighting and landing in jail. "He was about as mad an Indian as I ever saw when he found out that he would have to get out and stay out. I had not thought of Ki Ki for years until I read in the newspapers about the report of the mountain devils near Spirit Lake. I should not be surprised if these giants prove to be descendants. ..."

A Clallam tribal member living in the Vancouver area suggested that the marauders could be members of a tribe known as the Seeahitk, last known among his tribe in 1909 and believed to be extinct. Jorg Totsgi said the Seeahitk made their home in the heart of the wilderness on Vancouver Island and in the Olympics. "The Seeahtiks are seven to eight feet tall with hairy bodies, like bears. They are great hypnotists and also have a gift of ventriloquism, throwing their voices at great distances."

Two forest rangers in the area of the alleged bombardment called the story a hoax, saying they found nothing to substantiate the miners' claims. The purported footprints, they said, were fabricated, and they demonstrated their possible manufacture with the knuckles and palm of one hand. The monstrous rocks thrown by the "ape-men" were in evidence at the cabin, but could have been placed there by the miners themselves, the rangers claimed. They also reported that the same group of miners had been forging into the wilderness and bringing back similar stories for the previous five years.

Major Lee Moorehouse, a Pendleton fixture and an expert on Indian lore and legend, called the whole story a product of the miners' imaginations. "The mountains and the forests are solemn places, and their vast spaces and deep solitude often cause tricks to be played on the minds of those who remain a long time in them. It is my idea that such will be found to be the case in this apeman story," Moorehouse said.

"I recall the campaign of 1879 against the Sheepeaters. That was on the Salmon River in Idaho in the Seven Devils country. Mr. Whirlwind, an Indian doctor, and a man of more than average intelligence, was one of our scouts in that campaign, and he swore that he saw dwarf Indians on some of his excursions. They were not more than three feet tall, he said, and he admitted that he never was able to get very near them, but he held onto the story that he had seen them with his own eyes."

The report of pygmy Indians was never proven. Later reports said that the sightings were the result of a trick Mr. Whirlwind's imagination played on him.

Retired rancher has narrow escape in Yukon Territory

A Morrow County mainstay avoided being trapped in the wilds of Alaska in June of 1969 with a little bit of luck and a whole lot of help.

Retired Lexington-area rancher Orville Cutsforth had a narrow escape in the Yukon Territory of Alaska the second week of June in 1969 as he was ferrying a plane to his large gold fields at Kotzebue. He and Frank Baldwin, the owner of the plane and a passenger in the small craft, had just flown over a 100-mile-long lake full of floating ice when the motor of the plane conked out.

"That's when the good luck started," Cutsforth said in an interview with the East Oregonian. He was faced with a sizable mountain, but just managed to get over it, searching for the Alaskan Highway on the other side. The highway was there, and fortunately for the pair a 7,700-foot Army emergency landing strip also was in sight.

"Someone was really looking after us on that trip," Cutsforth said, shaking his head.

Cutsforth landed without incident and rolled up to a helicopter parked on the field. The crew of men there had leather that Cutsforth used to make a new gasket for the plane's motor, and tools to complete the job.

The crew was there only because their Native guide was late in appearing. Just as Cutsforth completed his repair job and got the plane's motor started, the guide arrived and within minutes the crew had left the airstrip. "Had anything been timed differently we would have been in that desolate area by ourselves," Cutsforth said.

Cutsforth and Baldwin followed the Alcan Highway the remaining 74 miles to Whitehorse, where they discovered a search party had been organized to look for them. Cutsforth took a commercial plane to return to Heppner, leaving the disabled plane in Alaska. The motor of the plane was sent to the Lexington airport for repair. Baldwin took a commercial flight to Kotzebue and rented a plane to use until his was fixed.