It’s time to celebrate #FreeBookFriday…with today’s giveaway, Wicked Portland: The Wild and Lusty Underworld of a Frontier Seaport Town!
Top 3 reasons you should enter to win:
- The book comes from Finn J.D. John of the popular “Offbeat Oregon” column.
- It is the first THP title to feature QR codes, which offer exclusive supplemental information (like short videos, audio podcast episodes and additional pictures).
- Chapter titles like “America’s Most Pernicious Shanghai City,” “World’s Dumbest Drug Smugglers,” and “Portland Saloons and Gambling Dens” point to quirky stories with great entertainment value for locals and true crime enthusiasts alike.
So, comment at the end of this post by Sunday, July 8 (12 a.m. EST), and be sure to enjoy the free chapter excerpt below!
More about Wicked Portland:
In its youth, Portland, Oregon, combined a rough-and-ready logging camp with a gritty, hard-punching deep-water port.
Lusty lads dallied with hard-eyed beauties in dark alleys, and crimps and captains bartered in blood money for the drunk and drugged.
From the seedy waterfront to the notorious North End, Portland’s sin sector offered vices packaged in pint glasses and perfumed corsets…
A lumber crew, working with axes and “misery whips” and hauling logs out on a skid road with a team of oxen, clears land in part of what today is downtown Portland in the early 1870s. J. Gaston, Portland: Its History and Builders (1911).
Establishments like Nancy Boggs’s floating bordello and city police chief James Lappeus’s Oro Fino Saloon beckoned to the city’s wastrels and grifters, votes could be bought for the price of a pint and Bunco Kelly’s Mariner’s Rest fronted a shanghai operation.
The front cover of a booklet of sheet music for a song written in 1867 to be played and sung at temperance rallies. University of Oregon Special Collections.
Join Finn J.D. John as he reveals the roughest, most colorful era of Portland history, when the Rose City developed an international reputation for violence and lawlessness.
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Commenting!
Would love a copy of this! Looks great!
I love Offbeat Oregon History!
This is entertaining history! I would love to win this book.
I loved the interview with the author and I am very interested in this book!
Want!
I love Portland, so this would be a great book for me.
Ah, so that’s where Portland gets its “weird” roots from… looks like a fascinating book!
Would love to win a free copy! Thanks!
When Finn was a young cub reporter at the Silverton Appeal, he also wrote for the newspaper I edited, The Stayton Mail. He was interesting then and showed great promise. I’m really pleased to know he has published this book. Sounds terrific and quite interesting. I would love to get a copy. And, Finn, keep up the good work and lets have another reunion one of these days.
I find the offbeat and quirky stories of our past particularly interesting. We need to “dust off” history and this book sounds like it does that for Portland!
I would love a copy! I miss home so much!
Congrats to Neil Heilpern, winner of Finn J.D. John’s “Wicked Portland!” We’d like to thank everybody else for their participation with coupon code WICKEDPORT. Enter the code at checkout for 30% off your order at http://tinyurl.com/82ebuma!
This looks like a great book!