Keanes Creek Falls

Ok, next up we're visiting another see-it-while-you-maybe-still-can seasonal Columbia Gorge waterfall. The first one of these was Crusher Creek Falls, which you can catch a brief glimpse of along I-84 while going somewhere more interesting (let's be honest here). This time we're visiting one you can catch a quick glimpse of along the old Columbia River Highway while going somewhere more interesting, honestly, though I do have a fun bit of history to pass along this time. Recall that my goal in this little project was to visit places where I wouldn't run into anyone else or (more importantly) any viruses they might be superspreading at the time. My point of view is that it's better to visit a fourth-rate destination and have it all to yourself than go to a crowded first-rate one and then drop dead and maybe take a bunch of people with you. It still astonishes me that this is a controversial idea, but as we've seen over the last year, millions of people, and entire states, and certain major national political parties violently disagree. As in literally violently. But I digress.

As scenic highways go, the Columbia River Highway gets off to a slow start, and tourists who haven't done their homework are bound to wonder what all the fuss is about until the big reveal at Chanticleer Point. The initial part of the road heading south and east from Troutdale closely follows the Sandy River at a low elevation, with steep 100'-200' bluffs set back a bit from the river. Right along the highway is largely residential, almost suburban, with a handful of scattered businesses, while the land atop the bluffs is a sort of plateau, agricultural and roughly flat, or at least flat enough for tractors, and part of that land is drained by a number of small creeks that tumble off the plateau on their way toward the Sandy, at least during the wet season. Several of these appear right to the highway, as kind of a seasonal preview of what things are like along the highway a few miles east. I've tried counting them a few times under the right weather conditions and usually come up with 5 along the stretch between Glenn Otto and the Stark Street Bridge, plus/minus about 2 depending on how wet it's been recently.

Beyond idly trying to count them while driving, I'd never really paid them much attention, and it doesn't appear anyone else has either. They largely don't have names, there aren't signs for them, or official parking to stop and look, or trails to the top, or anything like that. And let's be honest, nothing along here really holds a candle to what you'll see at Latourell Falls and points east, so the lack of attention is understandable. So a few months ago I was looking through the USGS Geographic Names database for a different blog post, as one does, and noticed that exactly one of the streams through this area has an official, federally-recognized, taxpayer-funded geographic name. And on looking up the GPS coordinates of Keanes Creek on the state LIDAR terrain map, there was obviously a vertical drop of at least a few tens of feet from the point where the creek tumbled off the bluff. I came up with a height of about 45' from the map, but I always seem to overestimate heights that way and I can't say this looks 45 feet high to me -- though the top's obscured by brush, so there may be another 5 feet or so of it we can't see here. The most important detail here is that it's the one waterfall on the creek, and the creek has a name, so -- per the rule of thumb I mentioned in the last post -- it can automatically go by "Keanes Creek Falls". Which matters because I can't exactly do a post about it without a title. Or more to the point, I could do that but without a name nobody will ever stumble across this post as a search result.

The USGS database tells us basically nothing about the name, merely saying dates back to at least 1964, when the name appeared on a state watershed map. A 2016 county survey map included a number of earlier maps for context, and one (unfortunately undated) map (4th image in the doc) shows the surrounding area being owned by a "Thomas Keane", so it may have been "Keane's Creek" at some point and then fell victim to the strict USGS policy against apostrophes -- an FAQ page of theirs indicates that nobody knows when or why this rule came about, but they've only granted five exceptions to it since 1890. I can at least tell you that it's the only creek by this name in the United States, although another Keanes Creek does exist in a mountainous corner of the Australian state of Victoria, and there's a Keane Creek in far northern Alberta.

None of those details make for a very interesting story, so I tried searching the library's Oregonian database for the name "Thomas Keane" to see if any fun leads came up. If we stick to local people and events there isn't a lot of material there: A man by that name broke his arm in a car accident in 1911, and there's a 1921 obit for someone by that name, who may or may not be the same gentleman as the first item, and he -- or they -- may or may not be the same guy from the survey map. Somewhat intriguingly, the obit was followed up by a 1923 classified ad trying to contact the executors of his estate, regarding a letter from a Richard Keane of Queensland, Australia. But that particular loose end stops there, and we can only guess at whether the letter ever found its destination, or what the letter was about. Perhaps the two long-lost twin brothers had a childhood pinky-swear deal to someday name creeks after each other, and it happened as agreed but neither one ever learned whether the other had held up his end of the deal. Or at least that's one of many possibilities.

Of course you don't have to live here to own land here, and a few other Toms and Thomases from around the globe had cameos in the local paper over the years, several of whom would make for a more interesting origin story than "named after a farmer who once owned the land here":

• A famous Irish actor of the late 19th century; an 1891 article noted that a local theater ensemble had recently hired someone who had once worked with him, which either tells us he was a very big deal, or that our local theater scene was not.
• A notorious New York gambler, circa 1950
• A Chicago mob figure who got whacked in 1923, during a gang war over control of the illegal beer trade, because Prohibition.
• Also in Chicago, a multimillionaire city alderman (and prominent member of the Daley machine) who went to Club Fed for mail fraud in 1974. He appeared in the Oregonian via a lot of cynical Mike Royko columns over the years, like this one from 1973 (while he was under indictment) and a later one in 1982, just to pick out a couple.

The reason I'm throwing all of this at you is that the falls are directly across the street from the the site of a once-notorious roadhouse-slash-dive bar that I do have some links and anecdotes about, and it would really tie this post together if somehow the creek and falls were named after someone a bit more... colorful, let's say. The chain link fence in the first photo surrounds what's left of Shirley's Tippy Canoe, which burned to the ground in January 2020 in a fire authorities described as "suspicious" at the time (though no further news on that front has come out since then). A 2008 profile of the old place's last owner notes that it had long been a notoriously rough biker bar, until she took over and gave it the family-friendly treatment, even bringing in Guy Fieri to have a look at the place for his Food Network show in 2018.

News stories about the fire say the Tippy Canoe dates back to the 1930s, but it seems to have first appeared in the Oregonian in 1946, in an article about the Oregon Liquor Control Commission changing its mind and granting the owner a liquor license for a "Dine and Dance" establishment. Which was a specific category of liquor license back then, and is a term you still see on a few historic bar signs. As I understand it, if you served dinner and offered a dance floor with live music afterward, the state figured you were a high class joint and could be trusted to serve mixed drinks, instead of just beer and wine.

The Tippy Canoe next showed up in the news in 1948, when its liquor license was suspended for 60 days "on the ground that a liquor sale had been made there", meaning shots as opposed to mixed drinks. Which was highly illegal at the time because reasons.

Next up we have a 1951 story in which the bar's owner publicly denied that a sympathetic OLCC agent had tipped him off about an upcoming inspection. It seems that the OLCC agent and several others had been fired for this and other alleged offenses and it all ended up in court, which was embarrassing for everyone involved. The owner related that he had, however, been visited by several OLCC agents employing one of the agency's time-honored stings: The agency liked to hire agents who either were or looked like they might be underage, to see if various establishments checked ID like they were supposed to. However the would-be enforcers succumbed to the siren song of the Tippy Canoe's pinball machines, and after downing three or four beers while playing decided to try to cheat the machine. This got them 86'd, at which point they revealed they were important government agents on an undercover mission. Which must have been hilarious. The presence of pinball machines in a drinking establishment was scandalous in itself in 1951, as they were seen as (and sometimes were) thinly veiled slot machines. And furthermore, it was widely understood that the Portland-area pinball trade was controlled by the local mafia outfit. You might think this would be a long and juicy scandal the papers could milk for weeks or months, but it just sort of fell out of the news after this, almost as if some sort of backroom deal had been made.

This all sounded very familiar, and then I remembered Portland Exposé (1957), a low-budget film noir that I wrote about back in 2007. The movie was set in Portland, with at least some exterior shots filmed here. I haven't rewatched it in years, but I remember thinking the outside of the hero's roadside bar was either the Tippy Canoe or the nearby (and similar) Tad's Chicken 'n Dumplings. In the movie, the hero allows a few pinball machines into his bar and quickly gets roped into all sorts of underworld shenanigans, before agreeing to wear the world's most obvious wire for the feds. Using exterior shots of a place widely known to offer such illicit entertainments in real life may have been a little wink at local audiences. Maybe that even counted as product placement, I dunno.

The OLCC semi-liberalized some of its vast galaxy of arcane rules in 1953, finally legalizing shots, the very thing the Tippy Canoe had been busted for in 1948. The Tippy Canoe promptly applied for one of the new "liquor by the drink" licenses and got one. The article goes on to explain that the OLCC also lightened up on advertising rules a bit, legalizing the words "bar" and "barroom", and allowing the use of brand names and sports scenes (but only noncompetitive sports). Other phrases like "saloon", "tap room", and "club privileges" were to remain strictly forbidden. And while it's fun to chuckle at the state's 1950s uptightness, I should point out that you couldn't advertise happy hour drink specials until 2017. If remember right, "saloon" and several common phrases like "happy hour" and "ladies night" were technically forbidden until quite recently, though the ban was not always strictly enforced.

The city's Mafia era tapered off after the 50s, but the Tippy Canoe remained a rough spot long after the mobsters relocated to Vegas. For instance, here's a 1966 item about someone arrested there for assaulting a deputy sheriff. In 1979 the bar's liquor license came up for periodic renewal, and it just so happened that the current Multnomah County chair was a former deputy sheriff, and during the hearing he reminisced about being assaulted by a patron there while on duty, many years ago. The best part is that he was not the deputy from the previous item, and this was just a thing that happened there now and then

In 1982, a couple wanted to buy the place and take over and be the next of a seemingly endless string of owners. The county sheriff opposed licensing them due to multiple rule violations at a bar they'd owned in Oregon City. The county commission disagreed and let them go ahead and have a go at running the place. After that it was mostly just live music listings, and then it closed and sat empty for a number of years in the 90s, before the family-friendly 2000s revival and the 2020 fire.

As for what's next, the site was recently (as in mid-April 2021) purchased by the couple behind the Sugarpine Drive-In at Glenn Otto Park (which I am a huge fan of). It seems they plan to rebuild here, while referencing the original restaurant's midcentury heyday.

So yeah, none of that really relates to the waterfall we're supposedly looking at, so I'm going to have to make a few things up for the sake of a better story. I'd love to be able to tell you this is the only waterfall in the state named for a shadowy mob figure, or spread a rumor about a mysterious safe deposit box key that may still be hidden behind the falls. It would even be fun to explain how 60s bikers often used the falls to get the excess blood and gore out of their gear after a good bar fight; this may have actually happened, as far as I know, but nobody else is going to explain how -- as late the mid-1980s -- you could make a lot of money panning for gold teeth below the falls. Or how I know all of this because our local enchanted nature spirits (naiads, dryads, hesperides, etc.) like to grab a few beers and talk shop after a long day dealing with tourists, and you can kind of eavesdrop if you're in the right place at the right time. And how the one who lives in Keanes Creek always has the best stories, though they all begin with "Long time ago, back in the day..."