The Background
The following anecdote, attributed to W.W. Goodrich, was published in The Atlanta Constitution just 9 months after Goodrich moved to Atlanta in 1889.1
Nearly everything in this story about an Oregon gold rush town appears to be a lie. It’s plausible that Goodrich passed through the location at some point, but he couldn’t even get its name right.
According to the Oregon Encyclopedia, Amelia City “boomed for a short time and quickly declined”, appearing on maps from 1876 to 1890. The article adds that the town’s “…peak population was likely a few hundred…”
So much for Goodrich’s description of a “town of thirty thousand miners…”, including some who “…had not seen a baby in twenty years…” And surely with thirty thousand horny men around, the town’s two young women would have been popping out babies like firecrackers. Oh, c’mon, you know the “old lady” was really a madam.
Even the story of Goodrich’s 1700-mile journey from Salt Lake City to Pendleton, Oregon, is a lie. In 1882, Goodrich lived for 6 months in Boise, Idaho,2 3 before moving to Seattle.4 That was when he could have passed through Amelia City, which was located on the route between Boise and Seattle, southeast of Baker City.5
Incidentally, the distance between Salt Lake City and Pendleton, Oregon, is less than 600 miles, but who’s measuring?
The only difference between an architect and a con artist is that an architect believes their own bullshit, and Goodrich seems to have straddled the fine line between the two his entire life, constantly running from one location to the next when his lies caught up with him, leaving scant architecture of merit in his wake.
In 1890, the Deep South was virgin territory for Goodrich, and it was no doubt easier for him to get away with his tall tales at a time when the telegraph was the fastest mode of communication, and long-distance phone service was nonexistent.
Travel to the other side of the country was also costly and precarious, and there would have been few people in a backwater like Atlanta who would have been familiar enough with the Far West to call Goodrich’s bluff. Still, you’d hope someone was astute enough to notice the ripe whiff emanating from his outlandish stories.
Notes by the Wayside.
Mr. W.W. Goodrich, the architect, has traveled very extensively. In 1882 he traveled seventeen hundred miles by private conveyance with his family, going from Salt Lake to Pendleton, Oregon. At Amelia, Oregon, he found a town of thirty thousand miners, and in the entire population there were but three women–an old lady and her two daughters.
Mr. Goodrich had along his little baby six weeks old, and the baby created a sensation in the camps. Some of the miners had not seen a baby in twenty years, and they crowded about and handed the baby from one another.
“If an artist could have painted the scene,” said Mr. Goodrich, “it would have been a most interesting picture. There were grizzly old miners with pistols in their belts and knives in their boots alternately crying and laughing as they passed the baby around. ‘God bless his little gizzard,’ said one fellow, as the tears streamed down his face.”6
References
- “Comes Here to Live.” The Atlanta Constitution, September 18, 1889, p. 4. ↩︎
- “Architect.” Idaho Tri-Weekly Statesman (Boise City, Idaho), March 14, 1882, p. 3. ↩︎
- “Personal.” Idaho Tri-Weekly Statesman (Boise City, Idaho), September 19, 1882, p. 5. ↩︎
- “Architect & Sanitary Engineer.” (advertisement) Seattle Daily Post-Intelligencer, September 29, 1882, p. 3. ↩︎
- Amelia City – Oregon Encyclopedia ↩︎
- “Notes by the Wayside.” The Atlanta Journal, June 24, 1890, p. 3. ↩︎