Aurora, Oregon; or, Our Alleged Susceptibility to Cults
In a few weeks, I’ll be participating in one of my yearly rituals. I lead a community barbecue club, and every spring we present a feast of smoked meat to hundreds of hungry onlookers, beginning with a parade featuring a prominently hoisted spit-roasted pig, a bagpiper, and hordes of naked blue people hauling smoked turkeys hung on chains. When I talked about it with a new member of the crew, he said that the positive reception to our antics was “another demonstration of the Oregonian susceptibility to cults.” He might not be wrong.
Over the years, deep greens, anarchists, lesbian separatists, cults of all descriptions and political radicals of every stripe have seeded the backwoods of the Beaver State with intentional communities, communes, and co-ops. By far the most infamous were the Rajneeshees, the red-clad post-hippies who in the mid-80s took over the town of Antelope and attempted to seize control of all of Wasco County via biological warfare – but they are only one standout example.1 As touched upon in the article on Cascadia, immigrants to this region have disproportionately included what historian Brent Walth calls “seekers of Eden,” people eager to build a utopia on Earth. California has that reputation too, of course, but in their case it’s tempered by the fact that people also come to California seeking material wealth, whether they be gold-hungry Forty-Niners or techies looking to sell their startup idea in Silicon Valley. Nobody moves to Oregon to get rich. More than just subsistence, many of our immigrants are seeking a spiritually grounded life, and this has been a constant over the past 175 years.
Religious sects and socialist groupuscules popped up here all the way back in the nineteenth century. There was Socialist Valley, a town in the Coast Range that paid yearly tithes to the Socialist Party out of the income of their fields and sawmill. There was New Odessa, a Ukrainian Jewish commune founded on the belief that the Torah had proscribed a simple, agrarian lifestyle, and that Oregon was the best place to live out that command. (The New Odessans were the folks that Ralph Friedman criticized for their lack of materialist analysis in the last article.) In Corvallis, the preacher Edmund Creffield gathered young women to his church, the “Brides of Christ,” in a way reminiscent of Charles Manson or Keith Raniere; that particular story ended in bloodshed (and will probably be a future subject for an article on here). As far as I can tell, though, the first cult in Oregon were the founders of the town of Aurora.
The tale of the Aurora Colony begins with Wilhelm Keil, Sr., born in Prussia in 1812. At the age of 24, Keil and his wife emigrated to the US and soon opened up a drugstore in Pittsburgh. But this was no ordinary neighborhood pharmacist. Tall, bushy-haired and bearded, with a piercing blue-eyed stare and a powerful air of command, Keil was known as a mystic, a healer, and an alchemist, dedicated to the search for eternal life. He was (apocryphally) said to concoct strange potions and to possess a grimoire of magic spells written in human blood. But this all changed when, one day, Keil found God. Pledging himself to Christ, he burned his alchemical paraphernalia in a public ceremony and began looking for the true church, instead of the philosopher’s stone.
He couldn’t have picked a better time. In the 1840s, America was in the throes of what’s known as the Great Awakening. This was a period of religious mania and evangelism. It saw the birth of the Mormons, the Seventh-Day Adventists, and a whole host of other sects. All across the country, people were receiving visions, speaking in tongues, and moving west to start communes – not unlike the 1960s. It was the perfect moment for an alchemical mystic to embrace Christianity.
Keil tried a few of the new denominations, but soon decided that none of their leaders were speaking the true word of God. He began preaching himself, and soon gained a following. He was a fiery critic of all organized religion and a proponent of Christian communism. This wasn’t communism in the Karl Marx sense; Marx was still just an obscure journalist at this point. This was the idea that early Christians, including Jesus and his apostles, lived communally and didn’t own private property; therefore, Christ was the first communist and we ought to follow his example.
Soon, Keil had set himself up as a prophet, and he began telling his followers that the end of the world would take place in 1844. This was actually a common belief among these new religious sects. The Millerites, who were the forerunners of the Seventh-Day Adventists, thought the same thing; they used complicated Biblical math to show that Jesus would return on October 22, 1844. Readers, this may startle you, but that didn’t happen. The date has gone down in history as the Great Disappointment.
The Great Disappointment was a career killer for a lot of evangelical preachers of the day, but somehow, it didn’t discredit Keil’s authority. When the apocalypse failed to materialize, he instead decided that he and his followers had to leave worldly society behind. He led about two hundred people west to his first colony: Bethel, Missouri.
Bethel looked, from the outside, like a typical frontier town. Families had their own individual housing, with the communal bunks reserved only for unmarried men. There were gristmills, sawmills, a blacksmith shop, and a school. But all the town businesses were owned in common, the general store didn’t charge for merchandise, and every decision was made by the personal fiat of Father Keil. He took confession from his followers, publicly shamed them for misbehavior, and was – of course – exempt from the collective labor required of everyone else in Bethel. Despite fathering nine children, he encouraged celibacy and forbade his followers from marrying outside the group. That goal of separation from the outside world was aided by the fact that German was the commune’s primary language, which kept a barrier between them and the Anglo-Americans that surrounded them. All this being said, though, it seems to have been a relatively peaceful society. Keil was a dictator, but he wasn’t violent or capricious like history’s more notorious cult leaders. His followers worked hard but had plenty of leisure time, as well as simple comforts like community music and good food.
The Bethelites began to profit from their industriousness. They made shoes and clothing for sale to other towns, they built wagons for emigrants heading further west, and their distillery became regionally celebrated for its Golden Rule Whiskey. By 1850, the colony had grown to over 500 people. As Missouri grew more populous and developed, however, the colony became more economically tied to the outside world, so Keil’s control over his followers started coming under threat. He announced that it was time to withdraw again, this time to the Oregon Country – but on the eve of their departure, in 1855, tragedy struck. Keil’s eldest son, Willie, abruptly fell ill and died.
Now, this wasn’t going to delay the exodus, but they weren’t going to just leave Willie behind, either. In a ritual act that carried echoes of Father Keil’s alchemical past, Willie’s lead-lined coffin was filled with the famous Golden Rule Whiskey. Preserved in alcohol, he would lead the emigrants west, his hearse taking point at the head of the wagon train. On to Oregon the funeral procession rolled, playing music and singing a hymn that Keil had composed for the occasion.
This was in 1855, and violence was in the air out on the Great Plains. Just a few years earlier, the US government had signed a treaty with eight native peoples of the plains to guarantee the safety of emigrant wagon trains in exchange for recognition of these nations’ traditional land claims. Big surprise, the Americans broke the treaty almost immediately and sat idly by as settlers stole tribal land. Retaliatory raids by the Lakota against the wagon trains saw many an aspiring Oregonian meet a bloody fate. Not the Bethelites, though. Tall-tale historian Stewart Holbrook claims that the pickled boy leading the train was seen as “strong medicine” by the Native peoples, and that Willie’s presence in fact acted as a protective magical totem. This seems like just a stereotyped flourish of Holbrook’s imagination; Keil doesn’t mention it in his diary of the journey, even though the idea of Willie saving his father from beyond the grave is a good story. Either way, it does seem like the Bethelites’ encounters with the Lakota on their way west were peaceful, marked by exchanges of food and song. It was still a hard journey, though. Keil’s diary described it thus:
An ugly world, terrible roads, all grass is poisoned, daily one, two, or three head of cattle expire. A heat that’s unbearable, all nature shows only vestiges of death and destruction, and all around the road can be seen graves and the bones of the dead! [But] even though all seven princes of darkness should try to prevent it, I happily succeeded in bringing every soul plus every wagon through. And the devil has been brought to everlasting shame because of me.
(That gives you a good idea of what he thought of himself.)
In late 1855, the Bethelites arrived on their land claim on Willapa Bay in what’s now Washington. They buried Willie the day after Christmas and got set to building a new town. The cold and isolated and heavily timbered Washington coast, though, was not the ideal spot for an agricultural colony. They decamped to the Willamette Valley less than a year later, leaving behind nothing but Willie’s grave.
The new colony, named Aurora after Keil’s daughter, was a success, at least in commercial terms. Located on the fertile Pudding River, Aurora became known not only as a prosperous farmtown but as a center for music and for instrument manufacture. Its community bands played all around the country. (They had two bands; the Aurora Colony Band was the professional one, while the other was called the Pie and Beer Band, because that’s how they were paid.) It became a railroad stop, a popular overnight destination for travelers, and a hub of German culture, although by the 1870s younger residents were beginning to speak English for everyday conversation. The food at their hotel was said to be delicious, and visitors were sometimes invited out for a discourse with Father Keil in the apple orchards that surrounded the town.
Beginning in 1872, Keil began to privatize some of the communally owned land. He had already outlived six of his nine children at this point and his remaining three sons didn’t really have what it took to succeed their regal father; he probably knew that his experiment wouldn’t last much longer. When he died in 1877, it didn’t take long for his followers to abandon the remaining trappings of the commune. All of the collectively owned land had been titled in Keil’s name, so a special probate session was called to divvy it up among the residents. Aurora was incorporated as a normal city and remains one to this day – it’s a quaint little spot along 99 West known for its charming architecture and antique shops.
It’s a bit of an anticlimactic ending, I’m afraid. This visionary project, which started off with a cult leader turning the Oregon Trail crossing into a necromantic alchemical ritual, ended up just leaving behind a legacy of sleepy prosperity. But that’s one of the reasons it’s so interesting: it’s an example of how ubiquitous and foundational weird, culty people and ideas are in our culture out here. I’ve already discussed how a group of communards living in a ghost town started our forest defense movement, but that’s only one example. The ballot initiative and referendum system was introduced to America here in Oregon by a group of reformers who met through spiritualist seances. The Rajneeshees’ expansionist plans ended up influencing our land-use laws. One of Washington’s governors drifted into the LaRouche movement after leaving office. Essentially, this is a part of the world where the distance between mainstream, establishment culture and the radical fringe is very small. In part that’s due to our relatively low population – everybody knows each other – but it’s also due to that spiritual questing and Eden-seeking that still lingers at all levels of our society, for good or for ill. As a cult leader, I suppose I should know.
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The legacy of the Rajneeshees continues to hang over any kind of organized hippie shenanigans in the state. I’m a regular participant at SOAK, the Oregon regional Burning Man event, which takes place in Wasco County. The other regionals call their largest piece of flammable art “the Effigy” – but since ours is so close to Antelope, we call it “the Major Burnable Structure” or MBS to avoid using spooky religious vocabulary and scaring the locals any more than we already do as a very culty-looking subculture.