Page:The War on the Webfoot Saloon.djvu/1



Frances Fuller Victor did not march in the ranks of the Great Crusade since, as she said, she had fought out her own crusade in private, long before, and the scars had not yet been effaced. But her heart was in the Cause and each new day of the campaign found her a visitor at Camp, sometimes as honored counsellor, sometimes as a kindly nurse who gave aid to the injured or succor to the weary, and when the War was over she wrote out its history in a little book so that there would ever be a record of those stirring deeds and grand heroics. If the unfeeling world has forgot, it was through no fault of hers.

In order to understand what occurred, it is necessary to keep in mind that in the seventies drunkenness was, on the male side, epidemic. The "eye-opener" set the day in motion, and thereafter citizens of every class "op'd their eyes" at regular intervals until they found they could no longer open them at all. Gentlemen of consequence on occasion nestled down in some convenient gutter and a jurist of more than local renown, by applying himself early and often, won the soubriquet, "the Whiskey Judge."

Conditions such as these prevailed throughout the nation and not least of all in Portland, where there was a licensed liquor outlet for every forty persons in the community, men, women and children taken together (though some of the latter were tee-totalers), establishments ranging in tone and appointments from the urbane Charley Knowles' Oro Fino down to the redoubtable Miss Celia Levy's Oriflamme. The saloons that lined Yamhill Street's "Court of Death" the rookery wherein nested the city's more bedraggled birds-of passage-were deadfalls without exception; poisonous dens