Ken Bilderback's Blog

The photo above shows the approximate location of the John Walker Donation Land Claim, which formed the basis for what became Laurelwood. I wish I had a satellite photo from 1900 for comparison, but I can’t find one.

If such a satellite did exist, it would look much different. There would be no Laurelwood Academy, no Laurelwood Road, and just enough homes to house the extended Walker family.

The Walkers were pretty much boxed in by the Chehalem Mountains, so their closest neighbors were Walter Hoffman to the south and Almoran and Sarah Hill to the west. The last house the Hills built still stands, on Spring Hill Road across from the end of Laurelwood. I don’t know where the Walker home was, but I think it’s safe to assume that it was between one and two miles away.

Almoran Hill’s house also served as a station on the Forest Grove-Lafayette stagecoach line, so if the Walkers walked there they could catch a coach south Dewey, where Spring Hill meets Albertson and Laughlin roads, where they could transfer to the Laughlin Gap stage to Yamhill, McMinnville, or Tillamook. More likely they would head north, either all the way to Forest Grove or to catch the train near where Spring Hill crosses Highway 47.

You might notice that I didn’t mention Gaston, which isn’t fair because they could take the train south into town. But because of the Chehalem Mountains, Wapato Lake, and the Tualatin River, there were few safe or easy connections between the Forest Grove-Lafayette stage line and the railroad, which paralleled the route Highway 47 now follows. In fact there were no year-round crossings between Yamhill and the what’s now the junction of Spring Hill and Highway 47. (Gaston Road wasn’t built until 1917 and washed out regularly in its early years). That made visits to Gaston by people east of Wapato Lake so rare that they often were covered by local newspapers.

Most donation land claims were one square mile (a few were a half square mile), so a trip into Forest Grove to buy flour or shoes would have taken the Walkers past only about eight properties until they transferred onto the stage at where Highway 47 now crosses Elm Street to finish the last leg of their trip. But because of how infrequent the stagecoaches and trains ran, that 20-mile round trip often took two days, so they probably checked their shopping list carefully.

I have not counted all the homes we pass today between Laurelwood and Elm Street in Forest Grove, but when you add up all of the side roads and streets, it’s probably into the hundreds, all on the same land that once had eight or 10 (although by 1900 some of the donation land claims had been divided, including to form the small town of Dilley). And the trip doesn’t take two days, even when you’re behind a tractor, which the Walkers probably would have loved to own.

I picked 1900 as the starting date for this little stagecoach trip down Memory Lane for a reason, because that’s the approximate date that Laurelwood and the rest of Washington County started to grow. In Laurelwood, the growth began when the Walker family donated two-and-a-half acres to the Adventists for a school in 1904. There are no Census figures specifically for Laurelwood, but in 1900 all of Washington County had fewer than 15,000 residents. Today it has nearly 600,000. About half of that growth has occurred just since 1980. About a quarter of the growth has occurred since 2000.

Now I’m going to look into the future to find a satellite image of what Laurelwood will look like in 2100 …

The following is an excerpt from Wheels on the Bus Copyright 2011 by Ken Bilderback. All Rights reserved.

This particular story happened a few days after Halloween, 1968. I had gone to the lunchroom at school and waited for my friend David to join me to exchange leftover Halloween candy. David was my best friend in those days, a quiet but happy kid with a complexion even pastier than mine. In fact I remember his skin as white more than flesh-colored. David came from a dirt-poor family, although he lived in a nicer house than I did. David and I had things in common, like never wanting to go home, and never wanting to talk much about his personal life. Instead we talked about cars and about the little Revell models we were building. I liked muscle cars, while David was partial to things like the Munsters mobile and Batmobile.

David didn’t join me at lunch that day, which surprised me because we had talked about it just an hour or so before. I figured he had gone home sick, which wouldn’t be surprising because he was sick a lot, often throwing up. When I got home a few hours later I plopped myself on the davenport to watch “Where the Action Is” or “It’s Happening” or one of the rock ‘n’ roll shows I could watch only when my father wasn’t home. On this particular Tuesday afternoon, my mother came from the kitchen with a worried look on her face. Someone from the school had called because they knew David and I were friends. David’s mother, it seems, had picked him up at lunch time, along with his little brother and sister. A couple hours later, one of David’s neighbors saw exhaust seeping from the garage of David’s house and investigated. Soon after police found David, his mother and his four siblings in the back of the family’s station wagon in the garage, all dressed in their pajamas, and all dead.

I imagine I cried a little, but mostly I was stunned. None of this made sense to my 12-year-old mind. My main question was not “why?” but rather “why were they in their pajamas?” Looking back, I think that was about as deep as I wanted to get to solving that mystery. I stayed on the davenport all evening that night instead of retreating to the basement because Walter Cronkite was on the old black and white Columbia television, reading the results of Richard Nixon’s victory over Hubert Humphrey in that day’s presidential election. “There’s news besides the election,” Cronkite said at one point, or words to that affect. “We have word from Detroit that a mother and her five children were found dead in the back of their car, all dressed in their pajamas, dead of carbon monoxide poisoning.” I sat on the davenport, hands tightly gripping the frayed fabric upholstery. I learned later that David’s parents had both lost their jobs months earlier and were getting a divorce. I never did learn why they were wearing pajamas at noon. My mother had me sit on the davenport the next day or so to explain why she wouldn’t let me be a pallbearer for David’s casket. I wouldn’t be able to handle the “trauma,” she told me. I asked her what a “Paulbearer” was and didn’t understand what her answer had to do with people named Paul. I protested a little, but not a lot. The fragile little boy on the overstuffed davenport had moved on from David’s death. I still had assassinations and such to worry about.

The following is an excerpt from Walking to Forest Grove, Copyright 2014 Ken and Kris Bilderback. All rights reserved.

When Rutherford B. Hayes decided to become the first American President to visit the West Coast, he chose Forest Grove as one of the cities he wanted to see, in large part because of the great legacy of education that Tabitha Brown had helped to create.

Unfortunately, he chose a travel planner as inept as Tabitha’s. After four leisurely days in Portland, Hayes was scheduled for an evening appearance in Vancouver, Washington, just about six miles north. His travel planners, however, squeezed in his visit to Forest Grove for his last day in Portland. The 30 mile detour to the west was lengthy back in 1880 under the best of conditions, and the conditions on Saturday, October 2, were far from ideal.

Befitting a visit by the President, a special train was assembled for the jaunt to Forest Grove. The train chugged along smoothly for more than 20 miles, but just seven miles short of its destination the train encountered a major problem: a damaged trestle over Dairy Creek and a ravine. A story in the October 4 edition of The Oregonian explains what happened next. President Rutherford B. Hayes, the First Lady, Lucy, their son Rutherford P. Hayes and the rest of the party disembarked and scrambled down the side of the ravine. The President of the United States and his entourage then made their way through thick brush and weeds, across the creek on “a weak foot bridge” and up the other side of the ravine. To entertain themselves, the reporter wrote, a chorus led by Lucy Hayes sang songs of the day. They walked under warm, cloudy skies for two miles until they stopped, exhausted and hungry. A group of Civil War veterans travelling with the President formed a foraging party and found an orchard, where they picked apples for a Presidential snack. By now hastily assembled railroad crews had repaired the trestle, and the train was able to cross and catch up to the hikers. After a brief stop in Cornelius, the train arrived in Forest Grove to be met by a fleet of carriages. Now too short on time to visit Pacific University, the President was taken to the home of E.R. Merriman, who had served with Hayes in the Civil War. When he finally spoke, 52 of the 310 words in his speech were devoted to complaining about the bridge that delayed his arrival and lamenting the fact that “our intercourse must be short.”

His speech still found a place in Forest Grove history for decades because of his proclamation of Forest Grove as the “prettiest town in Oregon,” which became the town’s motto for many years. But President Hayes used 243 of his words to talk about the town’s status as one of the West’s top educational centers, including Pacific University, which owed its founding to Tabitha Brown, along with missionaries Harvey Clarke and George Atkinson.

There are not many reasons for a 66-year-old, 108-pound woman who got around with the aid of a cane to ride and walk half way across the American continent, but founding a great university would have been a good one. That’s not why Tabitha Brown made her journey, however. In fact, when she first settled in what is now Forest Grove, Tabitha’s first job was sewing gloves, according to her biography in the university archives. Then she persuaded Harvey Clarke to help build an orphanage. Neither Harvey Clarke nor Tabitha Brown had a university in mind, however, until 1848, when the Reverend George Atkinson came to town. Atkinson did not arrive on foot from across the Plains, however. When his superiors dispatched him from New York City to Oregon to establish a Congregationalist university, Atkinson left by boat. He sailed down the Atlantic Coast of first North America and then South America, then around Cape Horn and across the Pacific to Honolulu, where he learned of Marcus Whitman’s death. From there he sailed onto Oregon to establish a university. On his arrival, missionaries suggested he visit Harvey Clarke and Tabitha Brown. The orphanage soon became Tualatin Academy, and then Pacific University. Tabitha died more than 20 years before President Hayes paid his visit in 1880, but her legacy was very much alive.

Hayes had come to see another indirect offshoot of Tabitha Brown’s orphanage: The Indian School. By 1880, the Indian Wars had been won by the settlers, at least in the Tualatin Valley, which was named, ironically, after the Atfalati people whose lives revolved around Wapato Lake, about six miles south of Forest Grove in what today is Gaston. When Rutherford B. Hayes arrived in Forest Grove, not much remained of the Atfalatis except for the Americanized “Tuality” and “Tualatin” names that adorned schools and rivers and valleys. Nearly all of the few remaining tribal members had been shipped to a reservation near Grand Ronde, 50 miles away.

But while the battles were over, bitterness remained among many of the white settlers. Some of the area’s most prominent citizens had ventured west across the Oregon Trail with Marcus Whitman, or in his footsteps, to the newly established Fort Hall. While Whitman put down stakes in Walla Walla, Washington, Joseph Meek, Almoran Hill and others continued on to the Tualatin Valley. Whitman, Meek and Hill remained close friends, however. When Meek’s wife died he sent his young daughter to Walla Walla to be raised by the Whitmans, and the Whitmans visited Almoran Hill several times at his home in what today is Laurelwood, on the banks of what was then Wapato Lake. When Marcus Whitman, his family and several others, including Meek’s daughter, were murdered in Walla Walla in 1847, Meek was named as the Oregon Territory’s first official law enforcement officer. One of his first official acts was to hunt down and execute the Native Americans accused of committing the Whitman Massacre. Meek died five years before President Hayes came to the Tualatin Valley, but Hill and many other veterans of the Indian Wars still held prominent roles in the area.

General Phil Sheridan’s Camp Yamhill was gone by 1880 as well, having served its purpose of preventing the Atfalatis from fleeing the Grand Ronde reservation to return to the land that had been taken from them around Wapato Lake. Although there is great doubt that Sheridan ever actually uttered the words most often attributed to him, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” there is no doubt that many of the settlers still held that view in 1880. Against that backdrop, the words of President Rutherford B. Hayes concerning the Indian School on October 2 were noteworthy, even if they did take second billing to his pronouncement of Forest Grove as “the prettiest town in Oregon.”

“Some persons think that God has decreed that they should die off like wild animals,” he told the assembled pioneers. “With that we have nothing to do. … This country was once theirs. They owned it as much as you own your farms. We have displaced them.” Of the Indian School he said: “I am glad that Oregon has taken a step in the right direction.”

The direction of the school that so pleased the President was not to return any land to the Indians, however, nor even to return these Indian children to their native culture. In fact, not one of the students at Forest Grove’s Indian School was from the Atfalati culture; all of the students came from tribes in Washington, purposely sent far from home to help destroy ties to their heritage. Harry Taylor, son of a teacher at the school, recalled in a November 26, 1925, News-Times article his dismay at seeing the young Native Americans cry upon arrival at the school, where they were stripped of their prized blankets and other tribal symbols, to be replaced with generic uniforms. The direction of the school, as outlined by President Hayes, was that “if this is so, if they are to become extinct, we ought to leave that to Providence, and we, as good, patriotic, Christian people, should do our best to improve their physical, mental and moral condition. We should prepare them to become part of the great, American family. If it turns out that their destiny is to be different, we shall at least have done our duty.”

The Oregonian reporter picks up what happened next. While the presidential party dined at Merriman’s home, staff of the Indian School assembled the students in a line on the lawn, where a crowd of several hundred people surrounded them. After lunch, the President came out to meet the students, where Army Captain Melville Wilkinson introduced him as “the man to whom they had been taught to call ‘the Great Father.’” The Great Father then shook hands with the students, stopping to ask a couple of geography questions and to speculate on the heritage of one “black” student, whose unkempt hair Hayes ruffled. With those words and a tip of his hat, the President then retraced his journey to Portland, this time crossing the rickety bridge by train and making it to Fort Vancouver, Washington, in time for a gala in his honor. The leaders of the Indian School returned to their mission of training new members of the great American family.

Although Tabitha Brown died 20 years before the federal government established the Indian School, its siting was a result of her efforts in the 1840s to turn Forest Grove into the educational center of the Northwest. In fact, in a very real way, Forest Grove began almost as a company town for Tualatin Academy and later Pacific University. That tradition of education was what led Army General O.O. Howard to select Forest Grove in 1880 as the site for his dream of establishing an Indian School.

Howard earned his general stars in the Civil War. According to William Ferrin, a former president of Pacific University, Howard’s experience in that war stirred an interest in the plight of American blacks. After the war, Howard was assigned to be commander of Fort Vancouver, the region’s most important military installation, as battles with Native Americans continued to flare up. Just as the Civil War had awakened within Howard an empathy for the people he called “the Negroes,” so too had the skirmishes in the Northwest created a compassion for “the Indians.”

Howard was familiar with the federal government’s Indian schools in Pennsylvania and Virginia, and wondered why there was no such institution in the West. Interior Secretary Carl Schurz, who was responsible for Indian affairs, also wanted a school in the West, but lacked the resources with which to establish one. In the era between the Civil War and the establishment of the income tax, the Defense Department was about the only government agency with money, but it lacked any statutory power to create schools. Together, Howard and Schurz hatched a plot to circumvent these obstacles, according to Ferrin, a Pacific professor at the time.

From his base at Fort Vancouver, O.O. Howard had become familiar with Forest Grove’s reputation for education, and dispatched one of his captains, Melville Wilkinson, to the town, ostensibly to teach military science at Pacific University. There was no military science program at Pacific, and Ferrin says the whole thing was a ruse; Wilkinson’s real assignment was to create an Indian School under the guise of Pacific sponsorship. A building rose on university property, and the Indian School opened in 1880, just months before the Presidential visit. Forest Grove’s reputation as the educational center of the Northwest was secure. The annual football games between the Indian School and Pacific University quickly became a tradition, but just as quickly faded. With little support from the government, the school struggled financially, and according to the Oregon Historical Society got by in part by hiring out the male students as laborers. The girls had it even rougher, according to Oregon Historical Society records. Of the 321 students who attended the school during its five years in Forest Grove, 43 died, mostly girls and mostly from communicable diseases from which they had no immunity. To add to the problems, the girls dormitory burned to the ground in 1884.

When Melville Wilkinson was replaced as superintendent by Henry Minthorn in 1884, Minthorn lobbied to have the campus moved to near his home in Newberg. The Oregon Legislature became embroiled in the controversy and decided instead to move the campus to Salem. Now called Chemawa Indian School, the school still operates today. Instead of teaching assimilation into white culture, however, it teaches its students their cultural heritage. Forest Grove lost its Indian School, one of the reasons for the first ever visit to Oregon by an American President, to the desires of a man with ties to Oregon’s most direct Presidential connection. The year the Indian School left Forest Grove, a young Herbert Hoover moved from Iowa to Oregon to be raised by his uncle, Henry Minthorn, superintendent of the Indian School.

Although Forest Grove lost the Indian School, Tabitha Brown’s long trek to Oregon was not in vain. Her efforts permanently cemented Forest Grove’s reputation as the ultimate college town. Rutherford B. Hayes’ long trek to Forest Grove had less of a lasting impact, although the story of his train trip makes for entertaining reading. Oh, and his speech cemented Forest Grove’s reputation as the prettiest town in Oregon. Except for one thing. Within the 310 words in his speech, the phrase “prettiest town in Oregon” never appears. He did say Forest Grove was “beautiful,” but otherwise the speech was all about extolling the virtues of education and complaining about a poorly maintained bridge that made him late for lunch.

I live in rural Oregon. There is a lot of anger in rural Oregon. On social media, nearly any subject is likely to arouse anger, even rage. Guns, grazing rights, immigrant labor, hunting, logging restrictions, labor laws, farming practices, education, all enrage some people. Nearly always, people bemoan the loss of rural heritage at the hands of urban elites. They feel forgotten and neglected.

The heritage of rural Oregon too often is forgotten, but usually not in the way the angriest people tend to think. The history they expound on social media typically is inaccurate, or at the very least, lacking in context. I don’t say that as criticism, however.

I think back to my college history classes, some of which dealt exclusively with urban history. I also learned about the Oregon Trail and Wild West shootouts. Yet as I began to research our books about rural Oregon, I realized that I had been taught little if anything about the everyday lives of people in areas such as where I live. I went online and found dozens of books about Portland history, many of which I already had read. I found almost as many that included tales of rural Oregon, but most focused on specific topics such as logging or on unusual events such as crimes. Very few offer any real context of rural societal norms or economics.

I also found diaries of early settlers, some very interesting and informative, but also written from a very narrow perspective. Some regale us with tales of bravery and kindness while omitting the story of their buying or selling young girls for indentured servitude, sexual and otherwise, for example.

The most common criticisms I hear about the books we write are that we rely heavily on newspaper archives and that we use too many specific examples to make a point. Recently someone asked me why I use “20 examples when one would do.”

Here’s why. I was curious about the social safety net in rural areas before Social Security and Medicare. Most of the accounts I found in history books talked about extended family. Some talk about poor farms and insane asylums. None mentioned suicide as a solution to old age and poverty. But page through newspapers from the 1890s, for example, and nearly every copy has a story of at least one suicide death of someone bereft of hope and care. Some include several suicides in a coverage area of a few hundred people. How do you convey that story without citing many examples with as much insight as you can glean into personal stories?

When people cite Peter Burnett’s famous assertion that there was no violence among Oregon pioneers, citing 10 examples disputes his point more effectively than citing one.

Another example is the battle over public grazing land, which came to the forefront during the Bundy occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge. To justify their anger, the Bundys issued a manifesto on their historical version of federal land management. Oregon Congressman Greg Walden issued a similar version of history. The Bundys’ version was complete fiction, with virtually no basis in reality. Walden’s history was more accurate by distorted by lack of context. Neither addressed the fact the government had tried desperately to give the land to private individuals or that many of the individuals who did claim the land either abandoned or sold it back to the government for profit.

When I found dozens of examples of such cases and of murders committed by people fighting over access to government land, the Taylor Act and other restrictions made perfect sense.  Yet histories that ignore that legacy continue to inflame rage and violence among some people and engender empathy for their actions among others.

So here’s my suggestion: At least in rural Oregon, devote a segment of high school history to rural issues. Talk about Japanese-American farm laborers and the hesitant Braceros brought to Oregon to replace them after internment. Maybe, just maybe, that would reduce the anger over migrant labor. Talk about the carnage inflicted on wildlife by for-profit hunting tourism companies. Perhaps that could assuage at least some of the anger over hunting laws. Talk about William Henry Harrison “Buck” Myers and the phrase “a well-regulated militia” takes on a new interpretation that might ease a little of the rage over gun control.

I always try to understand why things are the way they are before getting angry. Maybe that’s just me.

A pebble can change the course of nature, and history. I’m not talking about the Ripple Effect, however. I choose to call this Current Events.

Here’s an example.

The story of race and crime unfolds in our new book.

The Tualatin River drains much of the east side of Oregon’s Coast Range mountains. In other words, it drains a lot of water.

Its headwaters cascade down the mountains with incredible force, creating rapids and waterfalls. Then the Tualatin hits flat land near Gaston, and becomes a meandering, and flood-prone, stream.

Indigenous people accepted this reality, but since the first American settlers arrived on the scene, “taming” the Tualatin has been a top priority, but every effort has failed. I’ve read hundreds of pages of engineers dissecting these failures, but my mind always wanders back to a week I spent in Gold Beach, Oregon, about 25 years ago.

I spent a late-summer vacation to hike in the wilderness around the Rogue, Illinois, and Chetco rivers. The Illinois nearly kicked my ass, but that’s a story for another day.Each night I returned to a beachfront hotel in Gold Beach, where I became enchanted by a small stream, no more than nine inches wide, that came from a hill and cut across the flat beach into the Pacific. Sometimes it was what I believe is called a rill taking the path of least resistance, in this case a straight channel into the ocean. Other times it meandered, winding 10 to 20 feet from side to side.

On my last day of vacation, I took a cup of coffee down to the beach to watch this rill. I was debating what hike I should take that day, but my thoughts were consumed by the previous day’s hike along the Illinois River, one that nearly kicked my ass when I thought that I had become disoriented in the wilderness.

I sat there with my coffee, watching the rill. I watched as a pebble, no doubt deposited by the previous high tide, created a small disturbance on the north side, slightly diverting the current and creating an equal and opposite reaction on the south side, bending the current ever so slightly north, where it met a small shell fragment, no doubt deposited by the high tide, which diverted the current ever so slightly to the south, creating an equal and opposite reaction …

Long story short: I never took a hike that day. I sat on the beach until mid-afternoon, watching that swift, straight little creek become a meandering stream to the Pacific, cutting 10 to 20 feet side to side. By now it was too late to start a hike.

As I began the five-hour trip back to Portland, I thought about how by the time I got home, the tide would be high again, depositing new pebbles and shell fragments in the path of least resistance for that little rill.

Then I thought that by the time I got to work the next morning, the process I had just witnessed would begin to repeat itself.

I learned a lot about geology that day in Gold Beach, in some ways more than I learned in college geology classes. Butterflies flap their wings. Tides deposit shell fragments. Often that’s all it takes for nature to prevail.

That’s my assessment of Current Events.

These forms are required to re-establish a Hill Cemetery Board.

How to apply for cemetery license

Cemetery_Questionnaire

Cemetery Board application

Background check form

1973 In Remembrance of Forest Dale School Here’s a remembrance of the community buried under Hagg Lake, as captured by the children at Forest Dale School 

Walking to Forest Grove

The following is an excerpt from Walking to Forest Grove, Copyright 2013 by Ken Bilderback. All rights reserved.

The events of November 1930 seemed out of place in Forest Grove. Just about midnight on November 20, with Thanksgiving just one week away, neighbors in the small farming community of Hillside saw flames coming from the farm of Clifford Thompson, who had moved to the town of Banks and was now ready to rent out his vacant farmhouse and barns. By the time Vandervelden arrived, the house had been consumed by fire, and flames were coming from a barn a good distance from the home. Turning their hoses on the barn, firefighters managed to save it with relatively little damage. It didn’t take Vandervelden long to answer the two questions this fire posed: How did the vacant house catch on fire, and how did the fire spread to the barn? The answer was obvious, because the remains of the house reeked of gasoline, and the inside of the barn was covered with accelerants that for some reason had not ignited. In reality, Vandervelden would have guessed that this was arson even without those clues.

On Thanksgiving Day, the News-Times laid out the story and came to a startling conclusion. It seems that a few weeks before the fire at the Thompson place, flames had consumed another nearby vacant farmhouse and barn. Although he suspected arson, Vandervelden didn’t find enough clues at the earlier fire to confirm it in that case. But then a few days after the Thompson house fire, crews were called to another raging middle-of-the-night barn fire in the same area. This time the farmhouse was occupied by its owner, Karl Schaefer, and was untouched. The fire, however, consumed not one but two of his large barns, which also were occupied, one with horses and one with cattle. This time Vandervelden was certain that arson was the cause. First, someone had released the livestock into the field. Second, the rubble smelled of gasoline. Third, Schaefer had a pretty good hunch about why he was targeted; he had just rented much of his acreage to Japanese berry farmers and he knew that some neighbors were unhappy with him for doing so. Vandervelden called in veteran Washington County Sheriff John Connell, but Connell dismissed Schaefer’s concerns.

But when the News-Times talked to Clifford Thompson about this latest fire, he told the reporter that he, too, had just rented the farm to Japanese berry farmers. The vacant farm in the first of the arsons had been for rent, although the owner said he had not found a tenant at the time of the fire. Still, the News-Times uncovered racial animosity in the Hillside area, not far from where in 1923 the Ku Klux Klan had held its state convention, which featured a 70-foot-tall cross, illuminated by electric lights instead of flames. The recent influx of Japanese farmers had rekindled animosity, and the editors concluded that racism was indeed the cause of the arson spree. By now Connell agreed, but there’s no record that any arrest was ever made. Regardless, the string of Hillside arsons ended at three, and the Japanese farmers went on growing berries, at least for 10 years, when they were sent to internment camps after Pearl Harbor was attacked at the start of World War II.

What’s a “Boxer”? A dog? A pugilist? Certainly, either answer is correct, unless you’re talking about Pacific University, in which case “Boxer” is a qilin. He’s also a mascot and a mystery.

Scene from the recently released video of a 1968 Boxer Toss.

Boxer has been missing since 1969 after a “Boxer Toss” at the height of anxiety over civil rights and the Vietnam War. Even those legendary “tosses” have faded into legend and myth for most people, at least until University Archivist Eva Guggemos unearthed a grainy 16-milimeter film from 1968 which features then-Pacific student, now Forest Grove Mayor Pete Truax.

Ken and Kris Bilderback have documented Boxer’s history in cooperation with the university, Mayor Truax and others.

Here’s a link to a video the Bilderbacks produced with the Metropolitan Area Communications Commission and Tualatin Valley Community Television.

A story with additional information will appear in this week’s News-Times.