April 13, 2024, 6:07am Clark County Life
When the Cold War ended in 1991, few considered the thaw had started in Vancouver 16 years earlier. In 1975, Russian delegates came to Pearson Field to dedicate the monument to the 1937 Chkalov Transpolar landing. Read story
April 6, 2024, 6:07am Clark County Life
America entered World War I on April 19, 1917, unprepared to provide the spruce essential to every airplane of the era, which helped protect Allies in muddy European trenches. Airplanes required the spruce found only along 50 miles of Oregon and Washington coastline. Read story
March 30, 2024, 6:05am Churches & Religion
In 1837, Hudson’s Bay Company Gov. George Simpson wrote to the Archdiocese of Quebec to request a Catholic mission be established in his company’s territory north of the Columbia River. Read story
March 23, 2024, 6:05am Clark County Life
Just east of the Kansas border at Carthage, Mo., 21-year-old Sarah Elizabeth Butler (1857-1931) opened her diary. Inside, she wrote eight sentences recording the first day of her trek along the Oregon Trail to the Washington Territory. She loaded that entry with information, perhaps rivaling her family’s packing of their… Read story
March 16, 2024, 6:04am Clark County Life
A lesser-known fact about America entering World War II is the bombing of a U.S. Navy base at Cavite on Manila Bay, Philippines, on Dec. 10, 1941, three days after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese wanted the Philippine Islands because they needed access to the raw materials of… Read story
March 9, 2024, 6:02am Clark County Life
Three months after the invasion of the Philippine Islands and the Battle of Bataan, the Japanese captured nearly 78,000 Filipino and American prisoners of war. Japanese soldiers marched them for six days down the Bataan peninsula to a railhead, denying them food and water before dispersing them to internment camps.… Read story
March 2, 2024, 6:00am Clark County Life
Thrown over his horse’s head while pursuing a bison, a stunned Paul Kane quickly remounted, thanks to the Indigenous men who’d caught his pony. Read story
February 24, 2024, 5:43am Clark County Life
Forced labor helped build Vancouver’s Municipal Airport during 1929. Several men guilty of vagrancy or drunkenness found themselves working at the nascent field constructing its first hangars while others cleared ground for more. While on the job three prisoners took “French leave,” as The Columbian chided. One was found dining… Read story
February 17, 2024, 6:27am Clark County Life
In 1929, newspapers from Honolulu to Boston published the name and photo of a 19-year-old Vancouver boy, Louis Proctor. Proctor had won first place in the National Airplane Model League of America contest. Read story
February 10, 2024, 6:02am Clark County Life
Army Air Service Lt. Oakley Kelly finagled the War Department into naming Vancouver’s airport after fellow aviation pioneer Lt. Alexander Pearson, who died Sept. 2, 1924, testing a prototype aircraft for the Army. Read story