The ice storm expected today might be bad. But it certainly will not be unprecedented. Portland periodically is hit with wintry hellions, sending our feet flying toward the sky and our cars skidding. One of the most memorable storms came 110 years ago this month when a "silver thaw" unexpectedly paralyzed the city.
"The greatest portion of the damage," The Oregonian wrote on Jan. 29, 1907, "was done on the East Side, where miles of telephone poles were prostrated, causing the wires to be hopelessly tangled." Communication with the outside world was cut off for much of the day and "the street railway system demoralized."
At the time, a well-known, history-minded Portlander compared what the city was experiencing to tales of an even worse weather event 70 years earlier -- "a great ice storm along the coast [with] ice coming like rain from the skies and freezing as it fell."
The story came from Colonel Frank J. Parker, who heard it from area Native Americans and the descendants of Oregon pioneers. With this 1837 storm, so the legend went, the danger was not immediate but delayed by about six months.
"From the stories told me a score of times from as many different persons, I am sure that this ice storm was the same sort of weather as we are now enduring," said Parker, a former scout for Indian fighter and famed Portland booster C.E.S. Wood. "The Indians and pioneers who told me of the severe winter of about 70 years ago declared that the ice was so thick on the trees that all the big branches were pulled off and the trunks were left bare. When summer came, these fallen limbs became as dry as tinder. In some manner, fire got started in this underbrush and raced down the coast like a hurricane."
The blaze, wrote The Oregonian, supposedly "swept from the Columbia River as far south as the present boundary between California and Oregon."
But let's have Col. Parker continue telling the story:
For miles and miles it swept everything in its path, leaving the once beautiful forests that had been growing for centuries simply a vast wilderness of seared and blackened stumps. These may be seen today by the traveler who journeys down towards the Yaquina and Coos Bay Country. There are thousands of these stumps of trees still standing, showing that before this fire some of the finest forests the world has ever known were within the boundaries of this commonwealth.
All the timber that covers that section of the state now has grown up since that fire of long ago, with but a few exceptions. Here and there one will find a giant monarch of the forest rearing its head high above its neighbors, thus proving that a few of the trees escaped the flood of flames.
The old settlers told me that before that great fire, there was no underbrush in those forests, but soon afterwards small trees that abound in Tillamook, Lincoln and Coos counties sprang up. The fire also killed nearly all of the wild animals in its track, thousands of bears, wolves, cougars and wildcats having been roasted alive. Most of the deer are supposed to have escaped into the eastern part of the state.
Now I fear that this storm will cause the limbs on the forest trees to fall as they did years ago, and when summer comes, dry out, then another fire may race through the timber, bringing ruin and death to many.
Parker's published warning caused a minor panic, but it would turn out that the reality of the 1907 storm couldn't compete with the legend of the 1837 one. The ice may have "demoralized" Portland's streetcars, but it couldn't even knock them completely out of service. In February, a real-estate company flogging property in the West Hills ran a blurb in the newspaper: "Did you notice that the Heights cars ran regular during the snow and ice storm?"
Five years later, another ice wave would hit Portland, prompting memories of the sort-of great storm of 1907. (Tales of the 1837 conflagration were not retold this time.) 1912's weather mayhem caused some $250,000 in damage, city officials estimated.
"With the city still in the throes of the wintry blast, with nearly everything encased in ice, the question of further destruction is held in the balance," The Oregonian wrote on Jan. 8, 1912. "A high wind or more icy sleet will add many fold to the ruin, while a thaw will relieve the situation very quickly. Which it will be, only time will tell."
Out of the folds of Portland's icy past come words that remain true today.
-- Douglas Perry