The replica 1842 Mountain Howitzer was purchased in 2004 by The Honorary Oysterville Militia in celebration of Oysterville’s sesquicentennial in 2004 and to “replace” the town’s first cannon that had been fired in honor of early day celebrations — the canon that Peter Jordan and his friends had inadvertently blown up in 1878.

Peter Jordan arrived in South Bend in 1875. He was 15 and he had come from Ohio to join his older brother who was a partner with Capt. A.M. Simpson in a sawmill. By the 1880 census, Peter was listed as an engineer on a steamboat and living in Knappton. Beyond those meager facts, little is known about Peter Jordan until his i881 marriage was announced, with the notable exception of this intriguing story:

It seems that in the “early days,” the booming oyster town of Oysterville offered little in terms of entertainment for the young folks and bachelor oystermen beyond school, church, and perhaps a stop at Dan Rodway’s Temperance Billiard Hall. One of their diversions while waiting between tides was to display their prowess by displays of strength.

Out near the high tide line was a pile of pig iron, and one stunt was to lift it by the teeth. But, the top competition in weightlifting was practiced on a 400-pound cannon (or carronade as the British call it), which had been off-loaded from shipboard on the high tide bank of the bay. Whether it was destined for one of the local merchandise stores for eventual sale or had been brought as ballast by an oyster schooner in its voyage from San Francisco is unclear. In any event, it ended up on the parade ground in front of the village and was used to mark celebrations such as the Fourth of July and New Year’s Day and the start of the annual Oysterville Yacht Club Regatta.

The story goes that one dull evening, Peter Jordan and his friend Johnnie Clark, having spent a few idle hours at Carruthers’ (non-temperance) Pacific House Saloon, decided to load up the cannon and fire it off. They were a bit overly enthusiastic with the black powder and the heavy round of rock from the discarded pile of ballast on the beach. The resulting roar blew the cannon to smithereens with, said the onlookers, “pieces flying all over town.” One chunk went through the roof of Chris Johnson’s house, 500 feet away.

No one was mortally wounded, though a sizable piece hit Peter Jordan on the side of the head and his status was nip-and-tuck for quite a while. He was carried to the nearby Stevens Hotel and only weeks of skillful nursing by Mother Stevens and the heartfelt prayers of the youngest Stevens’ daughter, Laura Belle, pulled him through.

Capt. Peter Jordan and Laura Belle Stevens were married in Astoria in 1881 and, despite the scars that he carried all of his life from the cannon mishap, Peter led a distinguished career as engineer or master of many boats including the Rosetta in 1882, the South Bend and the Garfield in 1884, and later the Gleaner and the Winona, and, in 1891, took command of the new steamer Queen.

In a modern-day update to the fate of the cannon, some years ago Pete Heckes of Oysterville found a piece of it near the area where Rodway’s Saloon had once been. Pete always assumed that Jordan and his buddies had “brought the cannon to the party” and it was fired from the street out in front. If only we could locate the site of Chris Johnson’s house, we might be able to fill in the blanks (so to speak.)