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	Podcast:		Offbeat Oregon History podcast
	Episode:		PST: Dancing in the 1880s, Columbia Salmon Fishing, with Charles DeLashmutt (WPA Federal Writers Project interview)
	Category:		Education
	Duration:		00:11:29
	Publish Date:		2021-04-06 14:00:00
	Description:		This is an episode in our weekly series titled 'Primary Source Tuesday.' Each Tuesday we have a reading from a particularly interesting historical item. Sometimes it's a historical tidbit that wasn't quite beefy enough to make a full column out of; other times, an especially interesting old newspaper article; frequently it's a short story from one of the frontier literary magazines that thrived in Oregon at the end of the 19th century. Today it's an interview by Works Progress Administration Federal Writers' Unit writer Sara B. Wrenn, conducted on Dec. 7, 1938, with an old piano player and onetime commercial fisherman named Charles L. DeLashmutt at his home in Lake Oswego. Ms. Wrenn titled it "Dancing in the 1880s," because Mr. DeLashmutt started out talking about playing piano with his two fiddle-playing brothers at country dances; but he goes on to talk about gillnet fishing on the Columbia Bar in the 1890s, and the old Astoria Shanghaiing culture. You can find the transcripts of the interview at the Library of Congress's Website, https://www.loc.gov/item/wpalh001973/ , or with an Internet search for 'WPA Writers Oregon Dancing 1880s.'
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