Antelope is a few dozen people in a dry valley of the John Day country, incorporated in 1901 and named for the pronghorn that once ran here in herds. In the early 1980s, for four years, it was the front line of one of the strangest and most dangerous episodes in Oregon's history.
The ranch
On July 10, 1981, Ma Anand Sheela, personal secretary to the Indian teacher Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, bought the 64,000-acre Big Muddy Ranch in southern Wasco County, about eighteen miles from Antelope, for roughly $5.75 million. Rajneesh's followers began building a city there, Rajneeshpuram, with housing and a large farming operation watered from the John Day River. Several thousand people came to live on the ranch, and many thousands more came for its festivals.
The ranch was zoned for farming, and a city on it collided at once with Oregon's land-use laws. The commune's leaders incorporated it anyway, kept county officials off the property, and pressed on. Oregon's attorney general, David Frohnmayer, went to court arguing that a city run by a religious organization violated the separation of church and state.
Antelope
The commune also moved into Antelope. About sixty followers took up residence there, enough to outvote the town's older residents, who tried to disincorporate their own town rather than see it taken over and lost that vote too. On September 18, 1984, Antelope was renamed Rajneesh.
Control of Wasco County was the larger prize. In the spring of 1984 Sheela launched a program called Share-a-Home, bringing homeless people from cities around the country to live on the ranch, in an attempt to register enough voters to win two seats on the county commission. The county challenged the new registrations, and most could not vote. Many of those brought in were later put on buses and left in Portland.
The Dalles
That September, people in The Dalles, the county seat, began falling sick. Over the following weeks 751 people were poisoned with salmonella and 45 were hospitalized. The bacteria had been grown in a laboratory on the ranch and spread deliberately on the salad bars of about ten restaurants. Investigators later concluded it had been a test for election time. It is regarded as the largest bioterror attack in American history, and at the time no one knew who had done it.
The collapse
On September 13, 1985, Sheela and several other leaders abruptly left the ranch for Europe. Rajneesh denounced her, and investigators who went in found wiretapping systems and the laboratory. Sheela was arrested in West Germany that October, extradited, and pleaded guilty to charges including attempted murder and assault; she served twenty-nine months of a twenty-year sentence. Rajneesh, arrested aboard one of his planes in Charlotte, North Carolina, that October, pleaded to two counts of immigration fraud, paid a $400,000 fine and left the country in November under an agreement not to return for ten years. He died in India in 1990. Rajneeshpuram was disincorporated.
On November 6, 1985, the people of Antelope voted to take their town's name back. As far as the post office was concerned, it had never changed; mail had gone to the ZIP code all along.
The ranch now
In 1991 a Montana businessman, Dennis Washington, bought the Big Muddy at a tax foreclosure sale, meaning to build a resort, and could not get it zoned. His company gave the ranch to Young Life, the Christian youth ministry, which took title at the end of 1997. It is now the Washington Family Ranch, the largest Young Life camp in the country.