Roger Rasmussen collection of Baker Klan No. 13 records and Ku Klux Klan research materials, 1880-2021

Roger Rasmussen is the grandson of Walter Lee Lansing, a one-time member of Baker Klan No. 13 and an Oregon State Police officer. Rasmussen obtained Lansing's papers relating to Baker Klan No. 13 in the 1960s.

Walter Lee Lansing was born in 1897 in Pine, Oregon. After a fight with his father, he left home at age 14 and worked as a laborer; by February 1923, he was working as a deputy sheriff in Baker City, Oregon. Around this time, he also joined the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, Baker Klan No. 13. It is unclear how long he remained with the organization; he may have left after the chapter, in 1924, tried him and O. F. Coulter for unspecified offenses against the chapter. Lansing later joined the Oregon Traffic Division in 1925, and the Oregon State Police in 1931. He remained in the Oregon State Police until his retirement at the rank of captain in 1958; during his tenure he was heavily involved in traffic safety programs. Lansing died in 1962.

The white supremacist, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic organization known as the Ku Klux Klan established itself in Oregon in 1921, when Klan members from the southern United States came to recruit members. By 1923, Oregon Klan leaders claimed that the state had 35,000 members in over 60 chapters. Klan members won elections for local, county, and state offices in 1922, and the organization helped elect Democrat Walter M. Pierce as governor of Oregon. Klan members and their allies in the Oregon State Legislature passed bills prohibiting foreign-born residents from owning land and prohibiting public schools from using textbooks that criticized the founders of the United States. The Klan in Oregon also helped to pass an initiative mandating that all children from ages 8 to 16 attend public school, a measure meant to target Catholic schools; this measure was never implemented, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in 1925. The number of Oregonians who were members of the Ku Klux Klan dwindled in the mid- and late 1920s, due both to displeasure with the leadership style of Exalted Cyclops Fred L. Gifford and multiple scandals involving the Klan in other states.