The Largest Bioterror Attack in the Country Came From a Commune

Rajneeshpuram, the commune Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh's followers built in the high desert near Antelope, briefly governed itself as an incorporated city of several thousand residents between 1981 and 1985, and its collapse involved the largest bioterrorism attack in American history, executed not for ideological terror but to win a local election. Over September and October 1984, commune members deliberately contaminated salad bars at ten restaurants in The Dalles with Salmonella typhimurium, sickening at least seven hundred fifty one people and hospitalizing forty five, a calculated attempt to incapacitate enough Wasco County voters to let commune backed candidates win county elections that November. Nobody died, and the plot was not publicly connected to the commune until federal investigators pieced it together the following year, by which point Rajneeshpuram's own leadership was already collapsing under separate federal prosecution, and the commune dissolved shortly afterward.

Oregon's religious landscape carries an older and much less dramatic missionary thread as well, the Methodist Jason Lee having established a mission in the Willamette Valley in 1834 that helped draw the first substantial American settlement to Oregon Country decades before statehood. The state today has one of the highest rates of religious non affiliation in the country, Nothing in Particular at twenty three percent of adults per Pew's 2023-24 study, and total Christian identification in Oregon runs to only forty two percent.