End of the Oregon

She was still proud, resolute, massively beautiful. As she lolled at anchor in the Willamette River in downtown Portland last week the sunbeams wriggled through her superstructure, flicked over the letters OREGON. Once she was the bravest battleship in the U.S. Fleet, the heroine and toast of the whole U.S. Now Washington had consigned her to the junk heap, where her 10,300 tons of steel, copper and brass could be turned into fighting metals for World War II.

The Oregon had a champion's string of firsts. She was the first modern battleship of basic U.S. design; the first major warship built on the West Coast (San Francisco's Union Iron Works, 1896). But her great claim to fame was that for 68 days the U.S. waited with bated breath while she raced against time: she had completed her shakedown cruise in the Pacific in time to start a 14,700-mile dash to the Atlantic to fight the Spanish Fleet. She almost foundered in the storm-racked Magellan Strait. She had no time to have her boiler cleaned, her bottom scraped. And she arrived off the Cuban coast just in time to wade into the Battle of Santiago.

On that furnace-hot, crystal-clear July 3 of 1898, her turrets swung around, her guns (four 13-inchers, eight 8-inchers) spat steel and death at the Spaniards, her sweating gun crews cheered. Six Spanish ships were destroyed, the Spanish flagship Maria Teresa was chased onto the beach. U.S. Commodore W. S. Schley wigwagged: "Well done, brave Oregon." And because the Oregon was almost late to battle, she clinched another argument, which ended U.S. isolationism forever: a Panama canal was vital to U.S. defense.

Then the Oregon traipsed back to the Pacific. She carried Marines to Peking during the Boxer rebellion, was on duty at the Panama-Pacific Exhibition, served as a World War I training ship, escorted transports for General William Sidney Graves's Siberian expedition in 1918. Decommissioned after World War I, she was supposed to become a Portland public monument (like the Constitution in Boston). But now her metal is too precious: she must die in a junk yard.

The Oregon is lucky, nevertheless. She lived and fought in the days when battleships were the proudest war machines of all-not just lumbering sea monsters born to shy and run when a tiny, saucy, death-dealing warbird comes screaming overhead.

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