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Portland's Shanghai Tunnels: What's History and What's Legend

Ask a Portland tour guide about the city’s underground and you may hear a story like this. Beneath Old Town, the story goes, a network of tunnels once connected the saloons and boarding houses to the Willamette River. Drunk or drugged men dropped through trapdoors into cellars, were held in cells, and were carried through the dark to waiting ships, waking up at sea with a contract they never signed. The tunnels were then forgotten, or hushed up to protect the city’s reputation.

Part of this is true. Men were shanghaied in Portland, and there are passages under Old Town. What historians haven’t found is any evidence for the version in which a tunnel network was used to move kidnapped sailors to the docks. This article sets out what’s documented, what’s disputed, and how the legend grew.

What shanghaiing was

To shanghai a man was to deliver him, usually drunk or drugged, to a ship’s captain who needed crew, in exchange for a fee. The middlemen were called crimps, and the money was known as “blood money.” As Richard Engeman explains in the Oregon Encyclopedia, the practice grew out of nineteenth-century maritime labor law. A sailor signed a contract for a voyage, and a captain who lost crew to desertion in port had to replace them before he could sail. San Francisco became notorious for it during the gold rush, when whole crews walked off their ships.

Portland came to it later, as the city became a major wheat port in the late nineteenth century. Grain came down the Columbia by riverboat and rail, and sailing ships arrived to carry it to Liverpool and to ports in Europe and Asia. Crews who had just come around Cape Horn or across the Pacific were often in no mood to sign on again, so captains turned to crimps. Data from seamen’s organizations such as the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific suggest shanghaiing was common in Puget Sound and Columbia River ports as well as San Francisco Bay. By Engeman’s account, it had ended by the close of World War I, as steamships with trained crews and better conditions replaced sail.

The method, as waterfront historian Barney Blalock describes it, was rarely dramatic. Violence was the exception. “Usually it was drugged whiskey in one of the North End saloons, or some sort of trickery played on young or inexperienced newcomers,” he writes in Portland’s Lost Waterfront.

The crimps

Portland’s crimps were real people, and some of their names survive. The best known is Joseph “Bunco” Kelley (the spelling varies), who claimed to have shanghaied a great many men. The most famous story about him says he found a group of men who had drunk embalming fluid in an undertaker’s cellar, believing it was liquor, and sold the living and the dead together to a departing ship. That story has never been verified, and it rests largely on later retellings. What is documented is that in 1894 Kelley was charged with the murder of George Sayres, an elderly former saloonkeeper whose body was pulled from the river, and was convicted. He maintained to the end that his former partner and rival, the crimp Larry Sullivan, had framed him. He served thirteen years in the state penitentiary in Salem before being pardoned, and then published a memoir, Thirteen Years in the Oregon Penitentiary.

Where the tunnel story came from

The tunnel legend is much younger than shanghaiing. Engeman traces it through two stages.

The first was Stewart Holbrook, a popular Northwest writer. In 1933 he wrote a series of romanticized pieces about shanghaiing and the old waterfront for the Sunday Oregonian. Several of his stories, Engeman notes, were “of dubious authenticity or attribution,” and they gave later storytellers a colorful stock of characters and scenes. Blalock points out that an eight-day Oregonian series on shanghaiing in 1933 doesn’t mention tunnels at all. He dates the idea of shanghai tunnels to apocryphal stories the paper ran in 1962.

The second stage came in the 1970s. Newspaper articles featured Michael P. Jones, who managed the Transit Bank, a social service agency for transient men in Old Town. He said he had been exploring Old Town basements since 1969 and had mapped a network of tunnels. Jones acknowledged that the passages had served other purposes too, but he emphasized their role in shanghaiing, and in 1979 his Cascade Geographic Society began running tours of the “Shanghai Tunnels.” The tours still run.

Historian Finn J. D. John has pointed out where many of Jones’s stories came from. As manager of a “hobo bank,” Jones was in daily contact with old men who had lived on the Portland waterfront, or knew people who had, and who were happy to tell him what they remembered or had heard.

What the passages actually were

There really are passages and connected basements under Old Town, and some have been found in recent decades. The Oregonian reported in 2017 that the owners of a 125-year-old Old Town building had blocked up openings to old tunnels in its basement before a tech company moved in.

The best-documented use for them is not shanghaiing. On February 5, 1919, The Oregonian described a group of city officials touring what it called “the subterranean labyrinth of Portland’s Chinatown,” with “great steel-barred doors, secret panels and carpeted stairways.” The article connects the passages to gambling dens and says nothing about sailors. Blalock argues they were built as escape routes and security measures for Chinatown’s gambling halls, opium dens and brothels, which faced police raids and rival tongs. Finn John adds that opium, legal but heavily taxed in the 1890s, was smuggled, and that some passages later served bootleggers after Oregon voters approved statewide Prohibition in 1914, years before national Prohibition.

The case against the tunnels, and a middle view

Historians make three main objections to the tunnel-to-the-docks story.

  • No contemporary evidence. Engeman writes that historians of Old Town have confirmed shanghaiing and crimping took place there, “but they have not found evidence of any network of tunnels linked to them.” Visitors on the tours, he notes, “walk into a basement.”
  • The river. Before the seawall was built in the late 1920s, the Willamette regularly flooded the waterfront in spring. Blalock argues that any tunnels near the river would have been underwater for much of the year.
  • No need. As Finn John puts it, a couple of sailors steering a passed-out companion down the street to a ship was such a common sight that nobody looked twice. A crimp had no reason to dig a tunnel to do in the open what no one would question anyway.

Finn John takes a middle position. He agrees the tunnels were never a delivery route to the ships, but he thinks it’s plausible that cellars under some saloons were used to hold drugged men until a ship was ready. He cites a Corvallis family’s account of two Danish ship’s officers held in a cellar beneath the Valhalla Saloon before being taken aboard. That account is family history rather than a documented record, and he presents it as such.

Why the legend lasts

The Shanghai tunnel story survives because it combines a real crime with a real place. Old Town’s basements are dark, damp and full of bricked-up doorways. The story gives that atmosphere a plot, and it seems to reveal a hidden underside to a city that likes to think of itself as wholesome. It’s also a reminder of how folklore forms. A romanticized 1933 newspaper series, a set of retold memories and a guided tour can, within a lifetime, produce something most visitors take for history.

If you go on a tour, enjoy it as a tour. The tragedy underneath it is real. Men really were drugged in North End saloons and woke up on ships headed down the Columbia, and most of their names are lost.

On Daily Creepypasta

For stories set in the region, see the Pacific Northwest tag. If you want a story about crews and the sea, Pot Forty-One is set on a Bering Sea crab boat, and the Deep Water tag collects the rest, from Poe’s MS. Found in a Bottle onward.

Sources

AI was involved in writing this article.

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