Pendleton

The Seven Toughest Men in Oregon History – Part 4

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The Seven Toughest Men in Oregon History – Part 8 – Sheriff Til Taylor

Of all the stories here, that of Sheriff Til Taylor is perhaps the saddest.

Sheriff Til Taylor was born in 1866, murdered in 1920 during a jail break. He was appointed Sheriff Deputy of Umatilla County in 1898 at the age of 32. Four years later he was elected to the post of Sheriff after the previous Sheriff, William Blakeley, retired.

He was a Democrat in a land of Republicans and was so popular that he would continually run unopposed for the post of Sheriff. Sheriff Taylor saw the end of the Wild West and highwaymen, and saw the start of Bank Robbers and Safe Crackers. It’s said that he had a memory for faces and would study pictures on wanted posters for hours on end, he frequently found men who had drastically changed from pictures twenty years old.

Once in custody he could get a confession from a criminal more often then any other Law Man around. His success rate, and general good nature, was such that he was envied by most other Police, and admired by crooks. Thieves wouldn’t even think of robbing anything in his territory.

Here is the part that puts Sheriff Taylor on this list. He personally arrested 2,645 men in 18 years as Sheriff. AND, he never killed anyone at all. He wounded several, but either relied on getting the drop on crooks, mentally staring them down, or simply wrestling them to the ground.

The murder of Sheriff Til Taylor set off one of the largest man hunts to that day. Over 1000 citizens spent a week tracking down the murderer and the five others who escaped at the same time in the Umatilla Mountains. When caught, a lynching of the six men was narrowly avoided when the Sheriff’s brother (who had been elected to fill Til’s vacant position the day after the murder,) spoke to the crowd and invoked the Sheriff’s memory to disperse the crowd and kept the prisoners from being lynched.

Despite Til Taylor’s important work as a Sheriff, his biggest contribution and what he is most remembered for, is as the repeated President of the Pendleton Round-Up and the work he put into making the event what it is today.

Oregon history is full of lots of other tough people. From the Governors prim and proper secretary who declared Martial Law in Oregon’s most Lawless Town, to the Cattle Baron who knew he was going to die. I love stories like these people’s lives, they’re inspirational. They didn’t just give up in the face of adversity, they just buckled down and kept going.

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The Seven Toughest Men in Oregon History – Part 6

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The Seven Toughest Men in Oregon History – Part 6 – Mat Taylor

In the 1870’s, Mat Taylor worked as a blacksmith in Pendleton, Oregon. He also taught dance classes. It’s said multiple times that he never started a fight, but he finished them. A frequent weekend past time for town locals would be to get drunks of all types mad by telling them that Mat Taylor challenged them. The drunk would get mad, then challenge Mat to a fight. He would put down his hammer, or pause his dancing class and then go bare handedly whip them.

Simply because he taught Dance Classes in the 1870’s Wild West, this would be enough to put Mat on this list. The fact that he also took on all challengers…

Click here to read about Lige Coalman – who lived on top of Mt. Hood

The Seven Toughest Men in Oregon History – Part 1

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The Seven Toughest Men in Oregon History – Part 1

Here are The Seven Toughest Men in Oregon History. Merely getting to Oregon in the first place separated the tough from the weak. Dangers such at Cholera, sickness, injury, malaria, scurvy, and worse of all, head and body lice. Once emigrants somehow managed to arrive successfully, they then had to wait out the long rainy fall and winter before being able to even start clearing fields and planting crops. Often they were already at the end of their food supplies and were left not option but to forage for food, or subsist on a single menu choice such as deer meat. It was often two or three years after their arrival before emigrants were growing a surplus of crops.

There were exactly two routes to Oregon during the 1800’s. Overland via the path now known as the Oregon Trail, or via ship all the way around South America and Cape Horn. Both routes were dangerous in themselves.

The Southern Route by ship around Cape Horn in South America was thought to be faster, but depending on who you talked to was either the safer or the more dangerous route. Until local industry and better transportation methods such as pack wagon trains and rail road came along, between 1840’s-1880’s this is the route that most goods shipped to Oregon took. Especially anything large and bulky. Between rough seas, unpredictable storms, unreliable charts, poorly maintained ships, and the risk of rotting food and contaminated water it was no pleasant sea voyage, yet thousands took this route.

But the vast bulk of immigrants to Oregon came over the Oregon Trail. Numbers range wildly from 260,000 to 1.2 million depending on the source. 500,000 seem to be the generally accepted number for 1841-1866. It’s estimated that roughly 2/3rds of these people went south to California, but the rest settled all across Oregon. Either way about 10% of these people died on the trail.

To be fair the below list includes many more then seven men. For instance trying to separate the Lewis and Clark expedition would fill this entire list by itself. Instead of order of “toughest” this is in rough Chronological order.

#1 Lewis and Clark Expedition