For those interested in Bend history, did you know there are several sources for browsing old local newspapers online? These are scanned and digitized copies freely available from a variety of sources, and (if the text is legible enough) they are also searchable. As long as you have an internet connection and a web browser, you can peruse these back issues going back over a century from home.

Of course, this doesn’t have the visceral experience of paging through binders full of old newspapers at the Deschutes Historical Society, but then again you can’t search for keywords and phrases doing that either!

Naturally there are more than just Bend’s newspaper archives available; here’s where you can get started:

• Google News Archive: Google has over 2,400 digitized newspaper archives available online, all searchable, and browsable by newspaper.
• Historic Oregon Newspapers: This is hosted by the University of Oregon, allowing you to search and access many newspapers starting as early as 1846.

I’ve found that while Google’s archives for The Bulletin are more comprehensive, the overall scan quantity of the University-hosted papers is better.

Here are specific newspapers to Bend and Central Oregon:

• Google’s archive for The Bulletin. Within Google’s interface, I find the date/timeline interface easily browsable, but for searching, skip the “search archive” box and just use this general Google search query instead: <keywords> site:news.google.com/newspapers inurl:nid=1243 — it searches within the specific issues rather than generally.
• The Bend Bulletin, 1903–1931: This was the original weekly version that was then supplemented by a daily (see next item); the U of O site currently only has issues up through 1922 however.
• The Daily Bulletin, 1916–1917: The first iteration of the daily newspaper, which became The Bend Bulletin (below).
• The Bend Bulletin, 1917–1963: The daily edition. Lots of gaps in years currently.
• The Deschutes Echo, 1902–1904?: This predated The Bend Bulletin, and was issued when the town (or post office) competed between the names of “Bend” and “Deschutes” for the area.
• Laidlaw Chronicle, 1905–1908?: “Laidlaw” is the original name for what would become Tumalo.
• The Redmond Spokesman, 1910–current: Redmond’s paper that started when the town area was settled and founded.
• La Pine Inter-Mountain, 1911–1934: La Pine’s early days.
• Abbot Engineer, 1943–1944: Newspaper for the military Camp Abbot (what would become Sunriver).
• Ochoco Review, 1885–1894?: Before Deschutes and Jefferson counties were created in the 1910s, the entire region was part of Crook County, and Prineville was the economic, political, and urban hub of the region (for relative values of “urban”). All the early frontier news starts here.
• Prineville Review, 1894?–1914: Ochoco Review became Prineville Review.
• Crook County Journal, 189?–1921: Issues currently start in 1901.
• The Madras Pioneer, 1904–current: Jefferson County’s main newspaper.

The advanced search on the Historic Oregon Newspapers site is the best feature, since it has a ton of options you can use to filter and narrow your searches, including filtering by city and/or county, by a date range, and by specific newspaper(s).

Happy browsing!