New Outlaws enter Oregon territory

Sisters High School students are no longer the only “Outlaws” in the territory. They are being joined by their peers at Enterprise High School, in the far northeast corner of Oregon.

Last week, Enterprise, a town of about 2,000, ended eight years of debate over whether to retain “Savages” as the school mascot. The name, which dated back some 80 years, was accompanied by a caricature of an Indian brave.

Some townspeople argued that in modern times this was culturally offensive. The school board waffled and voted to keep the name Savages but to drop the picture. The issue simmered until this year, when the student body took it up and recently voted to change the mascot to Outlaws. The school board ratified that decision this month.

The design for an illustration to accompany the new name will be chosen by the students later this month. But all of the pictorial candidates proposed thus far contain drawings of conventional human outlaws, their lower faces masked by bandanas.

That’s where the new Outlaws diverge from the old. Although more recent residents may not know it, the official illustration that goes with the Sisters Outlaws name is a horse’s head. Why?

Former Superintendent Steve Swisher recounted the story in brief remarks at ceremonies opening the new Sisters High School in the fall of 2003. He noted that Sisters started its first four-year high school program in 1923. But by 1929, it still had no formal membership in the area’s high school athletic league.

Despite that, in 1929 the school asked that five or six of its students be allowed to participate in a track meet involving Bend and Redmond. In response, Swisher noted, “The Bend Bulletin wrote an editorial and said, you know, Sisters is just like an outlaw horse, trying to break into the pasture.”

The metaphor caught on in a way the editorial writer didn’t anticipate and was adopted by the high school.

Swisher said he didn’t know the end of the story, whether the Sisters athletes of 1929 did get into the track meet. But they do very well under the Outlaws banner in a full range of sports today.