| Letters | Oregon Historical Quarterly, 104.2

Letters

To the Editor:

The article about the Brooklyn Roundhouse (OHQ, Summer 2002) was wonderful.

The residents of the City of Portland are fortunate to be the owners of three great steam locomotives. Many younger people are unaware of the "age of steam" and the importance it played in the development of our nation. You have helped to educate us about one facet of operating a steam railroad.

The many photographs tell a fascinating story. I especially liked the combination of the old and the new. Wayne Depperman captures the essence of the necessary work going on in the roundhouse today.

Thank you for including the photos of women doing jobs that are traditionally thought of as "men's jobs." Women who worked during WWII got little recognition for the roles that they played in helping to win the war. My mother helped build submarines for WWII in Manitowoc, Wisconsin.

Judy Hall, Secretary

Pacific Northwest Chapter, National
Railway Historical Society, Portland, Oregon

To the Editor:

I very much enjoyed the biographical article about Barbara Mackenzie ["'I Didn't Do Anything Anyone Else Couldn't Have Done': A View of Oregon History through the Ordinary Life of Barbara Mackenzie," OHQ 103:4 (Winter 2002)] . Most of us never become prominent. When history concentrates on the stories of people who become prominent it gives us a skewed sample of the effects of events on ordinary people. A story like this, about someone who looks ordinary at first, tends to correct that error.

Barbara Mackenzie and Thomas T. Mackenzie are listed in the Roseburg Women's Club's Roseburg City directory for 1927 as living at 800 Templin Street, which would be at the south end of the Roseburg city street which runs on the east bank of the Umpqua, between the Southern Pacific yards and the river. It would have been a fairly rural address, cut off from the rest of the city by the railroad yards, and bordered on the west by the river.

In 1929 Thomas T. Mackenzie appears in the Roseburg News Review as the supervisor of the school work program at the high school, under which 20 boys and 2 girls worked half time in apprenticeship programs in the community and attended school half time. The program was supported by federal matching money under the Smith-Hughes law, administered by the Federal Board for Vocational Education. I was surprised to learn of such a program in existence before the depression, before the New Deal, and before the explosion of federal funding for local education, which I thought came about after Sputnik.

Thomas T. Mackenzie was also active in the Scottish Rite and acted as timekeeper at high school football games.

I am curious if Mackenzie had any connection to Lloyd Reynolds, the long time art professor at Reed College. Mackenzie and Reynolds were both listed as instructors at the high school in the 1927 Directory, and both would have been newlyweds, I think.

Charles Lee

Roseburg, Oregon

To the Editor:

What a pleasant surprise to open my Fall 2002 issue of the OHQ and find the interview with Fermore Craig ["Picking up the Drum: An Oral History from the Columbia Plateau," OHQ 103:3]. I first met Fermore, my third cousin once removed, about two years ago while researching William and Isabel Craig, my third great-grandparents. The journey to the present was different for the descendants of Adeline Craig Phinney, a sister to Joe Craig. Adeline, my great-great-grandmother, married Samuel Phinney, a white man, as did their daughter, Lilly Phinney, who married Oscar Valentine Porter. Their son, Oscar Porter, was my grandfather. Although my grandfather was only one-eighth Nez Perce Indian he was very proud of his heritage, and I remember him taking me to Celilo Falls to see the fishing by the Indians. He also told me of the problems his mother encountered as a woman who was one-fourth Nez Perce Indian and a divorced mother in the early 1900s.

During my research I met and teamed up with Lin Cannell of Orofino, Idaho, who had been researching William Craig for several years. Using our combined research she has now written a book that sheds new light on William Craig and his family and how they influenced both whites and Indians during an important era in the development of the early West. We are hoping to have the manuscript published in the near future.

Gloria Manning

Puyallup, Washington

To the Editor:

I just finished reading the Oregon Historical Quarterly article on Edward Bellamy's influence in Oregon ["Looking Backward at Edward Bellamy's Influence in Oregon, 1888–1936," OHQ 104:1 (Spring 2003)]. It held special interest for me as one who read Looking Backward about 1950 in a Willamette University course, "Social Ideals in Literature," taught by Professor Egbert S. Oliver. What a surprise it was to find the references to Prof. Oliver in the [article's] text!

Perhaps you know all about Prof. Oliver and his course. He was a fine teacher, but because the only major offered by his department was in "English Literature," his American literature courses were not credited toward the major. Therefore, he had to devise several "general education" courses like the one I took and probably influenced more students at Willamette than he would have had he offered a more specialized course for majors.

G. Douglas Nicoll

McMinnville, Oregon

To the Editor:

This is in regard to "Painting the Philippines with an American Brush: Visions of Race and National Mission among the Oregon Volunteers in the Philippine Wars of 1898 and 1899," OHQ, Spring 2003, Volume 104, Number 1.

Sean McEnroe's article answered a question that I have had for many years. As a boy clerking in my uncle's country store in Grant County in the 1940s, we sold ammunition for the hunters. While the majority of sales were for the popular Winchester .30-30 carbine, we sold several boxes of .30-40 Krag shells during hunting season. I often wondered how the .30-40 Krag rifles, with their awkward side-loading magazine, came to be used by Grant County hunters.

Thanks to Mr. McEnroe, it seems that the Oregon Volunteers in the Philippines were issued the Krag rifles in the field to replace the single shot, black powder .45-70 Springfield Model 1889 rifles that they were using at the time. Then the troops brought the rifles back to Oregon in 1899, where the rifles were stored in some Army or National Guard armory. When the US Army adopted the Model 1903 Springfield for service use, the Krag rifles were declared surplus and sold to Oregon hunters, who continued to use them some 50 years after their manufacture and use in the Philippines.

Larry G. Valade

Fredericksburg, Virginia

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