Day 90 – 10/3 – Baker City to North Powder, OR – 21 miles

When did the Wild West end? It’s a contested issue, in part because the whole notion of the “Wild West” is contested, but also because any prolonged, ill-defined era is going to suffer from arbitrary endpoints. If you pin down a historian, though, and make them commit to a year, they’ll probably squirm for a while, equivocate profusely, and then finally give up and say 1890. By that point, the railroad’s spread was largely conclusive, the open range of cattle range was mostly a thing of the past, and the US Census Bureau had declared that the frontier was closed.

My walk today was delightfully leisurely. While my original plan would have wiggled along a series of minor roads, zigzagging around I84, I made a late decision to just follow Highway 30. It’s lightly used, the distance was no greater, and it had the added bonus of passing through a real, actual town–Haines. While I didn’t have high expectations for it, I knew there was coffee, and that’s enough.

As it turns out, though, Haines proved to be a major highlight. The self-proclaimed “Biggest Little City in Oregon,” featuring “Whiskey in the water and gold in the streets,” Haines has done a fantastic job of preserving frontier architecture–both its own stone buildings and a bunch of log cabins that have been positioned in a central park. The steakhouse, which has a wagon dangling from its roof as an attention-getting sign, shares a few stories from the town’s wilder days. Here’s one: “Down the block where the steak house sits, a saloon once stood. On Feb. 28, 1911, a man entered the saloon, confronting Ed McCullough, who was the bartender. He said, “This is a stick up!” There-upon Ed turned around for a gun and the man shot him twice in the back, killing him on the spot. There was a party going on so the killer melted into the crowd. He was never brought to justice.” The sign ends with this cheery note: “The famous radio personality Walter Winchell once commented that if you wanted to kill someone, Baker County was the place because of some people ignoring a killing in Baker City.”

While I enjoyed every bit of my day off in Baker City, marveling at the pristine Main Street and its marvelous public art, I was surprised to discover that its own brand of wildness prevails. Indeed, last year, Baker City set a high bar for civic dysfunction. In September, the entire city council resigned, leaving the town without an elected government for a month. And over the course of the year, the council–when it had councilors–had to select a mayor three separate times. One of those mayors resigned after comparing Pride flags to Nazism. One persistent problem that the city faces is that the public is adamantly opposed to funding city government. Last year, the fire department was forced to cut ambulance services due to a budgetary shortfall, and it was an attempted public safety fee that triggered the council resignations. More recently, a tax levy to fund the police and fire departments was thoroughly rejected, even though the police can’t currently offer 24-hour services.

Down the road from Haines, I passed a very pro-Trump household, with multiple campaign flags waving, along with an American flag. After having been struck by the dearth of campaign signage throughout most of this walk, there has been a dramatic uptick since Pocatello, leaning overwhelmingly towards Trump-Vance. This was the first time, though, that I’ve seen a big Trump flag that simply declared: Convicted Felon 2024. The homeowner was so tickled by this message that he also emblazoned “Felon 2024” as the identifying tag at the top of his semi-truck.

I arrived in North Powder in the early afternoon and was pleased to kick up my feet outside the country store, sipping a root beer and inhaling a marionberry yogurt parfait. Looking around, I was struck by how the town was blanketed by campaign signs for Shane Rollins, who was running for Union County Sheriff. I’ve rarely seen that kind of overwhelming public support for a candidate, so I was curious about the backstory. The incumbent is Boyd Rasmussen, currently serving his fourth term as sheriff. The La Grande Observer is backing Rollins. Here’s how their endorsement begins: “Observer editor Phil Wright in an April 14 column explained the paper this year would not make political endorsements in part because he is too new to Union County to give an informed opinion on who the best candidate is to serve as sheriff. That changed April 28, when the Oregon Department of Justice released an eight-page report summarizing its investigation into Rasmussen. The department spent much of 2019 investigating Rasmussen for allegations of official misconduct from 2011-16.”

The article acknowledges that the ODJ ultimately didn’t indict Rasmussen, and it never states exactly what kinds of possible misdeeds were under investigation, but it largely attributes this to the statute of limitations having run out. Rasmussen, of course, denies everything.

One is left wondering, though, if the Wild West ever really ended around here.