Offbeat Oregon History podcast

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‘Rajneesh’ or ‘Osho’? In Oregon, his name is mud (Part 4 of 4) May 29, 2026

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AFTER THE ELECTION, the new formerly homeless residents of Rajneeshpuram were the most pressing problem for Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his followers. They cost a lot of money to feed and house, and they started fights and made trouble. Rajneeshee leaders started out giving them bus tickets home, but that got very expensive very fast. After all, it had cost $1 million to bring them in by busloads; sending them home one or two at a time would be many times more than that. So finally, the Rajneeshees gave up and, herding them all aboard buses, simply hauled them to downtown Madras and dropped them off. Social-services agencies were forced to take on the task of getting them all home. The Salvation Army alone spent more than $100,000 taking care of them. (Near The Dalles, Wasco County; 1980s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/23-08d.rajneeshpuramPart4of5.html)

Rajneeshees’ doom sealed by scheme to seize power (Part 3 of 4) May 28, 2026

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The Rajneeshee takeover of Antelope was not an anodyne bureaucratic exercise. To those who lived through it, it really did feel like a foreign military power had rolled into their town and occupied it. It started out very stealthily. Several properties in the town were up for sale, and suddenly there were offers on all of them. Very ordinary-looking people signed the documents and took possession. Then some more very ordinary-looking people moved into the properties.... (Rajneeshpuram, Wasco County; 1980s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/23-08c.rajneeshpuramPart3of5.html)

Rajneeshees got on well with neighbors ... at first (Part 2 of 4) May 27, 2026

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ON JUNE 1, 1981, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh boarded a Boeing 747 for a flight from Mumbai to New York City. Officially the trip was for medical treatment, and authorities were told he’d be heading back home to India afterward. But Rajneesh was not planning on returning. His movement, which had already become an international octopus with meditation centers in dozens of different countries around the world, had outgrown the Pune campus. He needed a new World Headquarters. And his new personal secretary, Ma Anand Sheela (formerly known as Sheela Patel Silverman), had found one for him. Sheela closed the deal for the property then known as the Big Muddy Ranch the following month, paying $5.75 million for it. It was 64,229 acres of Central Oregon rangeland with only the amenities one would expect a family ranch to have. And in late August, she chartered a Learjet to fly the guru in to see, for the first time, the dry landscape that was to be his new home. (Big Muddy Ranch, Wasco and Jefferson County; 1980s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/23-08b.rajneeshpuramPart2of5.html)

Rajneeshpuram: Oregon’s most (in)famous ashram (Part 1 of 4) May 26, 2026

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ONCE UPON A time in India, a man lived. He would go on to become one of the most influential thinkers in new-age thought, but at this time — the early 1960s — he was merely a philosophy teacher, and one of thousands of gurus living and discoursing in that land of gurus. His name was Chandra Mohan Jain. But even then, just a few years out of graduate school, Jain was different. To call him charismatic would be a colossal understatement. By all accounts, this man could look into your eyes and speak to you for a half hour, and you would hurry home to sell all your earthly possessions to stay near him. He was charismatic enough that, by 1966, he was drawing big enough crowds and making fat enough cash on the speaking circuit to quit his teaching job at the University of Jabalpur, seven years after taking it, to focus on his “side hustle” as an independent guru. (Near Antelope, Wasco County; 1980s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/23-08.rajneeshpuramPart1of5.html)

Opium culture a forgotten part of urban underworld May 25, 2026

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A century ago, the drug had a dark, smoky allure for the 'fast' young men and women of Oregon cities, and smuggling routes through Portland were supplying the entire West Coast with the exotic, deadly stuff. (Portland, Multnomah County; 1890s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1402a.opium-culture-portland-urban-underworld.html)

The ex-Oregonian who got the U.S. into World War II: Yosuke Matsuoka (#6 of series of 6 related episodes) May 22, 2026

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Ever wonder why Hitler declared war on the U.S. after Pearl Harbor, despite some really obvious reasons why it wasn't a good idea? Here's the real reason: In April of 1941, while visiting Hitler in Berlin, Japanese Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka, who grew up on the old Portland waterfront, induced Hitler to do a little bragging and to get carried away while talking about what Germany might do in a war with the U.S. “Germany would wage a vigorous war against America with U-boats and the Luftwaffe, and with her greater experience,” he assured Matsuoka. “This would be more than a match for America.” That’s when he said it: “If Japan gets into a conflict with the United States, Germany on her part will take the necessary steps at once.” With that, Japan had the personal pledge of the head of the German state that if war came, they’d back them up. And, of course, eight months later, they did. (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/22-11.matsuoka-imperial-japan-615.html)

Japan's most influential diplomat of all time grew up in Portland (#5 of series of 6 related episodes) May 21, 2026

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IT MAY BE true that the movement of a butterfly’s wings on one side of the world can seed a tornado on the other. But whether it’s literally true or not, it certainly is figuratively true, and nowhere is it better demonstrated than in the case of 1890s businessman and opium smuggler William Dunbar of Portland, Oregon. If we could take Dunbar out of the stream of history before about 1890, we would derail events that led directly to Imperial Japan’s alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in 1940; to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor the following year; to the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945; and (maybe) to the fact that the world did not end in a multi-gigaton nuclear fireball in late October of 1962. All this, because a politically well-connected drug smuggler in tiny, faraway Portland was unusually incompetent, and had taken a young Japanese boy into his household as a companion for his 14-year-old son. That little boy’s name was Yosuke “Frank” Matsuoka, the future Foreign Minister of Imperial Japan and the chief architect of the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, just before the Second World War.... (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/22-11.matsuoka-imperial-japan-615.html)

World's most incompetent drug smugglers lost tons of opium to theft, seizure (#4 of series of 6 related episodes) May 20, 2026

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AS YOU WILL have gathered, it didn’t exactly take brilliant detective work to figure out what was going on over at Dunbar Produce and Grocery. By November of 1893, word of what they were up to had been filtering up from the waterfront for at least a year and a half. So, in late November 1893, a grand jury returned indictments against 15 people — including Blum, Dunbar, and Lotan. The charges involved smuggling more than two tons of opium and running a human-trafficking operation smuggling thousands of undocumented Chinese laborers into Portland. The trial held the city spellbound. (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/22-12.blum-dunbar-opium-smugglers-616.html)

Blum and Dunbar smuggled opium by the steamship load (#3 of series of 6 related episodes) May 19, 2026

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By the end of the 1880s, Dunbar was one of the most respected and influential members of Portland’s business community, and a member of the Arlington Club. But all was not well with him. It’s not clear what happened to push Dunbar over the edge into industrial-scale criminal enterprise. It may have been the death of his wife. It may also have been the influence of Nat Blum, a flamboyant cigar-store owner who was a junior partner in Merchants Steamship Co. Or maybe he was criminally inclined all along, believing on a philosophical level that the U.S. government had no right to tell him what he could and could not do with his steamships. Or, maybe he just hated waste. After all, nobody in Portland was buying shiploads of Chinese goods; each time one of his steamships left Portland, loaded with grain bound for buyers in China, it had to sail back home in ballast. Not only was the return trip wasted, but Dunbar had to pay draymen to load and unload the ballast rocks that would keep the ship stable and safe. We can imagine him thinking about this: What cargo could I bring from China to Portland, on the return voyages, after bringing wheat from Portland to China? And we can imagine him realizing that there were two cargoes that would be extremely lucrative for him: People, and opium. (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/22-12.blum-dunbar-opium-smugglers-616.html)

Lotan's venture into opium smuggling was doomed from the start (#2 of series of 6 related episodes) May 18, 2026

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The problem with smuggling opium back in the 1890s was, although the stuff was still legal, it was taxed very heavily. That meant smuggling the stuff in without paying the tax was tantamount to stealing money from the government. And the government, as always, took money very seriously ... so if you were going to smuggle it, you needed a real cracker-jack team. And the Blum-Dunbar gang was a lot of things, but 'cracker-jack' — or even just 'competent' — wasn't one of them. (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/2408a-1202d.james-lotan-opium-king-661.161.html)

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