6. The Saloon
        on Railroad Street

They were the last remnant of a warlike race that had been brought to this country from the British Isles in the earliest days of the British colonial period. Their mission had been to establish a defense buffer between the original thirteen colonies and the Great American Desert. In the early days, they were mostly Celtic in origin. In the British Isles, the Celts were greatly feared by the English down through the centuries, and in America their culture of violence proved a considerable handicap to any act of aggression from the Spanish, French, Indians, or from the British government herself.

With the westward expansion, they moved into the Oregon country. Theodore Roosevelt described this "old race of Rocky Mountain hunters and trappers, and reckless, dauntless Indian fighters" this way:

To this day many of them wear the fringed tunic or hunting shirt, made of buckskin or homespun, and belted in at the waist,—the most picturesque and distinctively national dress ever worn in America. It was the dress in which Daniel Boone was clad.... they are in the main good men; and the disturbance they cause in a town is done from sheer rough light-heartedness. They shoot off boot-heels or tall hats occasionally, or make some obnoxious butt 'dance' by shooting round his feet; but they rarely meddle in this way with men who have not themselves played the fool. A fight in the streets is almost always a duel between two men who bear each other malice; it is only in a general melee in a saloon that outsiders often get hurt, and it is their own fault, for they have no business to be there.

—from Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail by Theodore Roosevelt.

There were people dancing in the streets of Old Sherwood Town because of these men, true enough, I have been assured by several eyewitnesses. The most celebrated act of violence in Old Sherwood Town occurred at this building on Railroad Street. Here, on April 8, 1892, a man named Alvie Fields shot and mortally wounded a man named George Williams. The Jury ruled the killing self defense. Little is known about Fields. Williams belonged to a family of frontier lawyers and moonshiners whose distillery was located where the United States Fish and Wildlife Service is currently planning to build an interperative center for the Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge.

Williams Family at Play at Sherwood Home, Circa 1918