Start here

Choose a question, read the sources, and keep the evidence with your notes.

Bob Zybach’s collection connects people and Oregon landscapes through oral histories, photographs, maps, court papers and journals. Begin with one question in any of the four published series. The links below take you to short guided readings, with the fuller sources close at hand.

A first question to follow

What changed in Soap Creek Valley? — compare residents’ memories with the historic Auto Tour and an account of managing the research forest.
What does Letitia Carson’s court record show? — follow a claim, an answer and two jury decisions through the transcribed documents.
What can one Elliott forest stop reveal? — connect a field-trip video, an earlier interview and photographs of Dean Mountain.
How do we compare accounts of the 1828 Umpqua events? — read a journal, a company report and a chief’s account recorded by a company officer.

Each trail has four stops. Use it on your own, with a class or with a family member; bring back one observation and the source that supports it.

How can students study a changing neighborhood?

The Alberta Street project began with research by Portland high-school students. Its 1992 and 2015 reports offer two views of the same neighborhood, twenty-three years apart.

Explore the Alberta Street source guide → Follow reading questions into the original reports on ORWW and compare how the teams studied the neighborhood. This is a guide to those published sources; the reports and interviews are not reproduced in the Library.

If you live nearby, or you are simply curious

Read one life, straight through, the way you would read a short book. Lorna Grabe was the first one printed: a former schoolteacher on her family, and on the group that looks after the Soap Creek schoolhouse. Jake and Willie Rohner is a Swiss family's farming life on the north slope of Coffin Butte, from a farm bought at the end of one world war to its sale to the U.S. Army at the start of the next.

Explore the 1989 Historic Soap Creek Valley Auto Tour online, stop by stop. Each stop connects the original illustrated pages with the Library’s place records.

If you are looking for a family

Series Index — start with a surname. Search the headings from all fifteen books, then follow their links to the printed pages. Try Moore.
People — profiles of narrators, interviewers and contributors. Other people named in the books are found through the Series Index.
Places — farms and landmarks, connected to the accounts that mention them.
People in the Letitia Carson records — historical family members and others named in the documents, with links to the evidence. The collection does not publish living descendants’ personal details.

Every printed page here has its own address. Click the small page number in the margin and your browser's address bar will point at that one printed page — so you can send a relative the page, not the book, and they will land on the paragraph you meant. How to cite shows what that looks like.

If you are researching or teaching

Use a guided trail as a source-comparison exercise. At each stop, record who is speaking or writing, when the record was made, and what it supports. Then compare two sources: where do they agree, where do they differ, and what would you need to check next? Keep a quotation separate from your own interpretation.

Soap Creek timeline — dated statements in the narrators' own words, arranged by period.
Bob’s research method in the 1999 thesis — how interviews, maps, photographs and historical records were brought together to study changes in the valley.
Letitia Carson documents — court, estate and homestead records. Distinguish a person’s claim from an answer or a decision, and follow the transcriptions back to the scans.
The 1828 record — compare accounts of the Umpqua events and keep track of who preserved whose words. The chief’s account comes through a company officer’s written record.
How to cite — cite the printed book and the printed page; add the Library's address if you want a reader to be able to click.
Reuse and rights, and provenance — who made each part, who published it, and what the Library did to it.
The Elliott interviews and field trips — follow a place through recordings, photographs and video, checking the date of each visit.

Finding the recordings. The Library has preserved copies of the Soap Creek and Elliott recordings supplied by Oregon State University. Those copies remain private during rights review. For archive access, use Oregon State’s Soap Creek finding aid (OH 006) or Elliott finding aid (OH 047). Where a cassette has not survived, start with the printed transcript.

Where the originals are. Bob Zybach publishes all fifteen monographs, the thesis and the Auto Tour as PDFs on his own site, and the Elliott material on ORWW. The Library's pages point at his copies rather than replacing them; the links are on the provenance page.

Two things to know before you read

Some of this is hard to read. People recalling the 1920s and 1930s use words that were ordinary then and are not now. Nothing has been softened or quietly edited out; the content note explains how the Library handles it and why.

A few pages are held back. Where that happens the page says so, and says the reason, rather than leaving a gap you would have to guess at.