In 1854, Charity Lamb struck her abusive husband with an axe near Oregon City. She became the first woman convicted of murder in Oregon Territory.

At sentencing, she told the court: I knew he was going to kill me. The judge replied: The jury thinks you ought to have gone away. She explained, clearly and precisely, why she couldn't. She was convicted anyway.

Eight years later, she was transferred to the Oregon Hospital for the Insane — not because she was insane, but because the governor needed to be able to say Oregon had no female prisoners. She died there in 1879. She is likely buried at Lone Fir Cemetery, in a section paved over around 1930. Her name did not appear in the cemetery records.

This episode is about Charity Lamb. It is also about what Oregon built for the women and the poor and the inconvenient long before she arrived — and kept building long after she was gone.

Lone Fir Cemetery and its unmarked asylum section. The 3,500 copper canisters at the Oregon State Hospital in Salem, corroding in a building for decades, now ceramic urns on a memorial wall waiting to be claimed. The potter's field near Warrenton, where bones were used as railroad fill in 1917. Washington Park — the Oregon Zoo, the Japanese Garden, the Rose Garden — built on the ground of the Multnomah County Poor Farm, where they keep finding remains every time they break ground for a new exhibit. Dammasch State Hospital in Wilsonville, where a subdivision now stands with no marker.

Oregon has been building underworlds for its inconvenient people since before it was a state. It names the streets after the men who built the institutions. It paves over the graves. It builds something beloved on top and forgets what's underneath.

Her name did not appear in the records. It appears here.

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Content note: This episode discusses domestic violence and abuse, murder, wrongful imprisonment, forced institutionalization, desecration of graves, and the erasure of marginalized people from the historical record. Charity almost certainly did kill her husband. The episode does not require her to be innocent to witness what was done to her.

As always — take what you need. Leave the rest.

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Sources include: Ronald B. Lansing, "The Tragedy of Charity Lamb," Oregon Historical Quarterly (2000); Diane Goeres-Gardner, Inside Oregon State Hospital; Oregon State Hospital Museum (oshmuseum.org); Oregon Metro / Lone Fir Cemetery; David Maisel, Library of Dust; Clatsop County Historical Society Quarterly (1982).

Breath & Bone is written and narrated by Martina Rutledge.

Find us on YouTube: @betweenbreathandbone

martinarutledge.com

The official story is always someone's story. The question is whose.

In this episode of Breath & Bone, Martina traces the tradition that has always run alongside the official record — the one that didn't need institutional permission to exist. The seanachie. The griot. The curandera. The grandmother on the balcony telling fairy tales from memory until long after dark.

Beginning at the Whitman Mission near Walla Walla — where two names for the same event tell two entirely different stories about power — the episode moves into the wisdom keeper tradition and what it actually means: not romance, but survival. Not nature, but exclusion.

At the center is Lisbeth, Martina's grandmother, who kept stories in fairy tales, herb knowledge, dreams, and a dance around a Berlin apartment that made the years melt away. And Johanna, Lisbeth's mother, who carried something unbearable in silence for decades and released it in a kitchen the night before she died.

Four generations of women carrying what the record left out. This episode asks what we do with what we inherit — and answers quietly: we tell it, as carefully as we can, to whoever is ready to hear it.

Content note: This episode discusses WWII and the refugee experience, violence against civilians, sexual violence (referenced, not detailed), death and grief, and the suppression of Indigenous history. It holds moral complexity throughout. No resolution is offered because none is available.

There is a legend that lives at Multnomah Falls.A chief's daughter who loved a young warriorand wanted to live.Who watched him get sick.Who cooled his face,left a bowl of water by his bedside,and slipped away alone in the nightto give her life for her people.

Her father stood at the water's edgeand asked the Great Spirit for a sign —that she had arrived safely,that she had been received.

The waterfall appeared.

She was witnessed. She was held. The spirit world answered.

In this episode, we stand at Multnomah Falls —a place I have returned to many times,a story I love and hold carefully,a legend that belongs to the Wasco peopleand the tribes of the lower Columbia —and we follow a question the falls have been asking me for years:

What does it look like when a community holds a woman completely?What was missing for the women who weren't held that way?

From there we move to Berlin in the 1830s —to three women held up as muses by the Young German literary movement:Bettina von Arnim, who published and refused to disappear.Rahel Varnhagen, who built a salon and fought every dayto be seen as more than the culture wanted her to be.And Charlotte Stieglitz — who wrote in private,who felt frustrated and depressed in a life too small for her,and who died at 28 in a white nightgownwith a dagger she had given her husband as a bride.In her farewell note, Charlotte framed her death as a gift to his creativity.She wrote her own erasure into the last words she ever put on paper.

From there we move to Paris —to Charcot's lecture halls at the Salpêtrière,where women's suffering became theater and their bodies became evidence.To Vienna — to a young woman named Ida Bauer, whom Freud called Dora,whose walking out of his consulting roomhe turned into a case study about her own repression.And to J.M. Coetzee's novel Foe —which makes the structure visible:the power moving in layers, the way it always moves in layers.

The inquisitor and the analyst are separated by three centuries.The verdict is the same.

SOURCES & REFERENCES

Wasco legend of Multnomah Falls:firstpeople.us/FP-Html-Legends/ALegendOfMultnomahFalls-Wasco.html

Charlotte Stieglitz — letters, journal excerpts, and poems published posthumouslyTheodor Mundt, Charlotte Stieglitz, ein Denkmal (A Memorial), Berlin 1835Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman, 1957Bettina von Arnim, Goethe's Correspondence with a Child, 1835J.M. Coetzee, Foe, 1986Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, 1905Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, 2003

CONTENT NOTE

This episode discusses suicide and self-harm(Charlotte Stieglitz, the Multnomah Falls legend),sexual coercion (Ida Bauer / Dora),the medical pathologizing of women,and the pattern of narrative authoritybeing used against those with less power.

As always — take what you need. Leave the rest.

CONNECT

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Breath & Bone is written and narrated by Martina Rutledge.There is a place between breath and bone where the old stories live.This is that place.