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COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL | WEDNESDAY, JUNE 12, 2019 | 11A Offbeat Oregon Shanghai Tunnels — Mostly myth, but not entirely is pretty good evidence that parts of the underground net- work we know as “the Shang- hai Tunnels” today were used to shanghai sailors. But they were used as dungeons, not as a transportation network. By Finn J.D. John for The Sentinel O ne of the most pop- ular tourist attrac- tions for visitors to Portland is a tour of the “Shanghai Tunnels” that ruin beneath Old Town’s streets. Historians of old Portland — credentialed academics as well as pop historians like Yours Truly — tend to scoff at the whole enterprise. Doug Kenck-Crispin, resident historian of the “Kick Ass Oregon History” podcast, once memorably referred to the process by which the Shanghai Tun- nel story developed as “The Bulls--ttening.” Barney Blalock, Portland’s dean of living waterfront historians, is also extremely skeptical. And they’re right … up to a point. The fact is, there T he modern Shanghai Tunnel tours are the fruit of the research, exploration, and imagination (in rough- ly equal parts) of a Portland character named Michael Jones. In the early 1970s, Mike Jones was the manager of a fi- nancial-institution-cum-so- cial-service organization called Transit Bank — “the world’s only hobo bank” — based in Old Town. Obvi- ously, this put him in close contact with a lot of the exact sort of people who, clear up into the 1920s, were most at risk of being shanghaied: ho- bos, bindlestiffs, and tramps. SOUTH LANE COUNTY FIRE & RESCUE SAVE MONEY. SAVE LIVES. Ground Ambulance Memberships $65 per year Ground Ambulance & Air Membership $115 per year Call 541-942-4493 for info. FOR EMERGENCY DIAL 911 Serving South Lane County. Kickin’ it with Cops Friday, June 21st 5 to 7pm Dunk tank, balloon artists, free BBQ hotdogs, condiments, sal- ads and beverages. Dunk the Chief of Police, city council members and offi cers. Kids can come try on duty gear and guess the weight Come and chat with command staff and the offi cers. Meet our K9 offi cers, Marco and Kimber. Sponsored by: Some of them, in 1972, were old enough to remem- ber those days. Others had just heard the stories from older fellows who were. All of them were happy to fill Mike’s ear full of wild tales of the goings-on in those dark, sinister tunnels that lay beneath the abandoned, de- crepit buildings along Burn- side, Couch, Davis, and oth- er streets of Portland’s Skid Row. Mike, over the decade, col- lected the stories, mapped the tunnel system, and in 1979 launched the Cascade Geographic Society and went into business leading tours for the curious — regaling them along the way with the stories he’d picked up from his bank customers, aug- mented to some extent with extrapolations and interpre- tations of his own. And that’s the storytelling foundation on which the Shanghai Tunnels tours are based today — still offered through the Cascade Geo- graphic Society. S o, what were the tunnels, then, if they weren’t used for shanghaiing? The earliest tunnels were probably dug by Chinese merchants, to conceal and smuggle opium. Opium, in the 1890s, was perfectly legal, but heavily taxed, and smuggling it was common and lucrative. The Chinese also had extensive illegal gambling operations that the police were constantly trying to shut down with heavy-hand- ed raids by sledgeham- mer-swinging squads of bluecoats. On those occa- sions when a half-dozen cops suddenly showed up and started battering away at the front door of one’s Fan Tan parlor, having a secret hidden passage connecting the joint to a laundry shop a couple blocks away was very handy. These tunnels were still being used for their original purpose in 1914, when Or- egon instituted Prohibition, and suddenly there was an- other useful purpose for se- cret underground tunnels. It’s not a coincidence that plenty of the Shanghai Tunnels to- day connect to drinking es- tablishments. And it’s that connection that makes the strongest case for the tunnels to have been used to shanghai sailors. Be- cause by far the most com- mon way to shanghai a man was out of a bar. T he classic vision of a shanghaiing, of course, involves a blackjack. But un- less you know exactly what you’re doing, clobbering a man hard enough to knock him unconscious is danger- ous business. Hit him too easy and you’ve got a bad fight on your hands; hit him too hard and you can get sent up the river for murder. It’s much easier and less stressful to chat your victim up, buy him a couple drinks, and slip a little chloral hy- drate into it while he’s not looking. “Contrary to local legend, and according to an old salt familiar with the Portland waterfront of the period, ac- tual physical violence … was almost never used,” histori- an Barney Blalock writes, in Portland’s Lost Waterfront. “Usually it was drugged whiskey in one of the North End saloons, or some sort of trickery played on young or inexperienced newcomers. Over the years, an untold number of men woke up with a terrible hangover onboard a vessel gliding down the Co- lumbia River to the sea.” There was a problem, though, for the aspiring shanghaier of old Portland. Shanghaied sailors are like electric current — they have to be used just as soon as they’re generated — before they wake up and start yell- ing for a cop. So, say you’re an unscrupulous bartender at the Valhalla Saloon at First and Burnside, circa 1905; you’ve got a likely-looking prospect at the bar practically begging to be served a Mick- ey Finn; but the next sailing ship doesn’t disembark until tomorrow night. What do you do? That’s where the shanghai tunnels came in. Corvallis resident Karen Watte’s family story of the adventures of her grandfa- ther and great-uncle — two Danish ship’s officers who made an unfortunate choice of places to have a drink — illustrates the system nicely. The two of them stepped into the Valhalla for a drink sometime in the late nine- teen-oughts, and wound up in a sort of dungeon under- neath it. Their shoes were taken from them, and broken glass was scattered around to prevent them from trying to escape. There they were held until the ship was ready to receive them. When it was time to go, they were then given pills to take — probably at gunpoint — so that they would be un- conscious for the transfer to the ship. (In their case, the ship was delayed by bad bar condi- tions, and Karen’s grandfa- ther and great-uncle woke up while it was still anchored near Astoria waiting for things to calm down. Both men dove overboard and swam to shore, to the cap- tain’s dismay; as trained of- ficers, they were probably his first and second mates, so it was a much bigger deal to lose them than it would have been with ordinary sail- ors. The two of them had to hide out with a friendly fel- low Dane who kept a shop there in town while the police combed the streets looking for them.) Were the tunnels used to actually convey Karen’s unconscious relatives to the waterfront to be loaded aboard ships? Almost cer- tainly not. Why would they be? The scene of a couple of half-drunk sailors helping a passed-out shipmate back to his berth was very familiar to anyone who spent any time in the old North End. There was literally no way to tell if that passed-out sailor was being shanghaied, or just helped to bed by his trusted friends. There was simply no rea- son to go to the bother of us- ing tunnels to deliver shang- haiing victims. Furthermore, during much of the year, the ends of the tunnels close to the river- bank would have been flood- ed. Before the seawall was built in 1928, the river often came right up into the streets of town during spring floods. It’s that seawall that’s re- sponsible for much of the mystery surrounding the tunnels, by the way. When it was built, dozens of build- ings were demolished, and any tunnels that might have run underneath them were collapsed. By that time, the Valhalla had already met a similar fate during the con- struction of the new Burn- side Bridge two years before, in 1926. So one can’t simply go into the tunnels and see if they lead to the river; if they once did, they sure don’t any more. B ut there is one other im- portant thing to consider, about the Shanghai Tunnels. Most historians agree shang- haiing more or less ended when sailing ships were re- placed with the faster, safer, more predictable steamships. Why would a sailor ship out on a sailing ship when he could serve on a steamer — a much more comfortable and less dangerous job? And so between about 1910 and 1915, as most of the merchant marine fleet switched to steam, shanghai- ing petered out and was gone — so goes the conventional wisdom on the subject. But in 1915, when shang- haiing was supposedly a thing of the past, there were still plenty of windjammers afloat. The last windjammer built in Oregon was built in 1921, and it was still operat- ing profitably in 1928 when it ran aground on Peacock Spit. Where were the remaining windjammers getting their crews, in 1920 and 1925 and 1930? They probably weren’t get- ting many from the ordinary run of sailors and merchant marines. There were a few old shellbacks who refused to switch to steamers, but after ’25 or so there couldn’t have been many of them left. They clearly weren’t get- ting them by shanghaiing ordinary loggers and farmers out of saloons and brothels, like in the 1890s. But then, in the 1890s al- most every ship in the har- bor was a windjammer. By the mid-1920s, maybe the shrunken remnant of the tall-ship fleet could get by on a smaller pool of shanghaiing victims … drawn from Port- land’s population of homeless men. Was shanghaiing still go- ing on into the 1920s, quietly and with the tacit approval of city officials who had every incentive to support it … so long as the shanghaiers re- stricted themselves to prey- ing exclusively on the home- less? Mike Jones got his stories and legends from hobos. A lot goes on in the “hobo jungle” that nobody in “re- spectable” society ever hears about. Of course, there’s plenty of tall-tale telling being done there as well. But — it’s en- tirely possible, and in fact rather likely, that the truth content of Mike’s storytelling is quite a bit higher than most of us would like to think. (Sources: Portland’s Lost Waterfront, a book by Barney Blalock published in 2012 by The History Press; “The Last Word on the Shanghai Tun- nels,” an article by Barney Blalock published Feb. 21, 2013, at portlandwaterfront. blogspot.com; “Shanghaiing in Portland and the Shanghai Tunnels Myth,” an article by Richard Engeman published March 17, 2018, at oregonen- cyclopedia.org; correspon- dence with Karen Watte) TWO HOMES, TIMBER, 100 ACRES: Stunning end of road retreat between CG and Creswell. 100 acres includes open pasture and merchantable and reprod timber. Home was remodeled and substantial addition placed in 2003, 3656 sq. ft. 3 bd, 3bath, hickory fl oors, tile, fi replace w/insert, plus new kitchen with granite, oak, and induction range. Detached 2-car garage, two barns, shed, plus immaculate 2nd dwelling (2788 sq. ft. MH). $874,000. Contact JOE WARD PROPERTIES for extensive Auction Packet. Joe Ward, 541-912-0934 (cell), joewardproperties@gmail.com (e-mail). Joe Ward Properties Joe Ward, Principal Broker PO Box 642 Cottage Grove, Or 97424 S entinel C ottage G rove 541-912-0934 (Cell Phone)
