Like her father before her, Bette Husted grew up on stolen land. The bench land above the Clearwater River in north-central Idaho had been a home for the Nez Perce Indians until the Dawes Act opened their reservation to settlement in 1895. As a child on the family homestead, Husted felt the presence of the Nez Perce: "But they were always just out of sight, like a smoky shadow behind me that I couldn't quite turn around quickly enough to catch."
Above the Clearwater chronicles her family's history on the land, revealing their joys and sorrows, their triumphs and tragedies. In a series of graceful and moving essays, Husted traces this intimate history, from her Cold War childhood to her struggles as a parent and finally to her life as a woman and teacher in the rural West. Her family's stories echo those of countless other families in the American West: the conflicts with guns, the struggles over land ownership and water rights, the isolation of women, the separations by race and class, the family secrets of mental illness and suicide.
With a powerful, poetic voice, Husted illuminates the tangled relationship between the history of a particular place and the history of the families who inhabit that place over time. As Above the Clearwater explores one family's search for a home on land taken from its original inhabitants, it quietly asks all readers to examine their own homes in the same light.
In Claiming the Oriental Gateway, Shelley Sang-Hee Lee explores the various intersections of urbanization, ethnic identity, and internationalism in the experience of Japanese Americans in early twentieth-century Seattle. She examines the development and self-image of the city by documenting how U.S. expansion, Asian trans-Pacific migration, and internationalism were manifested locally—and how these forces affected residents’ relationships with one another and their surroundings.
Lee details the significant role Japanese Americans—both immigrants and U.S. born citizens—played in the social and civic life of the city as a means of becoming American. Seattle embraced the idea of cosmopolitanism and boosted its role as a cultural and commercial "Gateway to the Orient" at the same time as it limited the ways in which Asian Americans could participate in the public schools, local art production, civic celebrations, and sports. She also looks at how Japan encouraged the notion of the "gateway" in its participation in the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition and International Potlach.
Claiming the Oriental Gateway thus offers an illuminating study of the "Pacific Era" and trans-Pacific relations in the first four decades of the twentieth century.
The Columbus Day Storm of 1962 was a freak of nature, a weather outlier with deadly winds topping one hundred miles per hour. The storm killed dozens, injured hundreds, damaged more than fifty thousand homes, and leveled enough timber to build one million homes. To find an equally ferocious storm of its kind, fast-forward fifty years and cross the continent to Superstorm Sandy’s 2012 attack on the East Coast. While Superstorm Sandy was predicted days in advance, the Columbus Day Storm caught ill-equipped weather forecasters by surprise.
This unrivalled West Coast windstorm fueled the Asian log export market, helped give birth to the Oregon wine industry, and influenced the 1962 World Series. It remains a cautionary tale and the Pacific Northwest benchmark for severe windstorms in this era of climate change and weather uncertainty. From its genesis in the Marshall Islands to its final hours on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, the storm plowed an unparalleled path of destruction.
In A Deadly Wind, veteran journalist John Dodge tells a compelling story spiced with human drama, Cold War tension, and Pacific Northwest history. This is a must-read for the tens of thousands of storm survivors, for history buffs, and for anyone interested in the intersection of severe weather events and climate change.
One of the Most Important Battlegrounds in the History of America
While it is in the eastern United States where most Americans identify our military history, the vast, resource-rich Pacific Northwest, stretching from Northern California through British Columbia, endured a series of battles and wars over the course of the nineteenth century that were of regional and national importance. It was here where Great Britain and the United States had their final confrontation in the Americas, where Chief Joseph attempted to secure independence for the Nez Perce, and where the Oregon Trail marked the first great migration to the West of settlers bent on carving out new lives in the wilderness. The Pacific Northwest also saw some of the only attacks on the mainland by Japan during World War II.
Beginning with the earliest known accounts of wars among the American Indians of the region, Fighting for Paradise: A Military History of the Pacific Northwest describes early European contact, including British trappers of the Hudson's Bay Company, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Jedediah Smith, and John Jacob Astor's trading post. The competition over the lucrative fur trade led to the "Pig War," which almost resulted in another armed conflict between Great Britain and the United States, but it was the influx of settlers from the Oregon Trail that touched off the long bitter battles between whites and American Indians. Starting with the 1847 Whitman Massacre and the ensuing war it touched off, the book covers the next three decades of violence, ending with the Sheepeater's War in 1879. Kurt R. Nelson then relates the Pacific Northwest's contributions to the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, the Mexican Punitive Expedition, World War I, and finally World War II, where the region fought Japanese submarine attacks and was harassed by balloon bombs. Throughout, the author provides current information about the state of preservation of various battle sites and other points of historical interest. Accompanied by maps and photographs, Fighting for Paradise provides insight into an area of American military history, rich in drama, that is not generally known.
In May 1855 twenty-seven men set out from the young Mormon settlements in Utah to establish the northernmost colony of the Kingdom of God, "the Northern Mission to the Remnants of the House of Jacob"-American Indians. More colonists, including families, would join them later. Building a fort in the Limhi Valley, four hundred miles to the north and at the foot of the pass by which Lewis and Clark had crossed the Continental Divide, they began to proselyte among Sacagawea's Shoshone relatives as well as members of the Bannock, Nez Percé, and other tribes. Three years later, some of their expected and actual Indian converts violently drove the colonists out and destroyed Fort Limhi.
In Fort Limhi: The Mormon Adventure in Oregon Territory, 1855-1858, David Bigler shows that the colony, known as the Salmon River Mission, played a pivotal role in the Utah War of 1857-1858 and that the catastrophic end of the mission was critical in keeping that conflict from becoming an all out war between Mormon Utah and the United States. In the process, he uses a multitude of primary sources, many newly uncovered or previously overlooked, to reconstruct a dramatic and compelling story involving stalwart Mormon frontiersmen, Brigham Young, a variety of Native American individuals and groups, the U. S. Army, and "mountaineers," as the surviving fur trade veterans now commonly known as "mountain men" called themselves.
Mitsuko “Mitzi” Asai was not yet ten years old in the spring of 1942 when President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 sent 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry—about two-thirds of them US citizens—from their homes on the West Coast to inland prison camps. They included Mitzi and most of her family, who owned a fruit orchard in Hood River, Oregon. The Asais spent much of World War II in the camps while two of the older sons served in the Pacific in the US Army. Three years later, when the camps began to close, the family returned to Hood River to find an altered community. Shop owners refused to serve neighbors they had known for decades; racism and hostility were open and largely unchecked. Humiliation and shame drove teenaged Mitzi to reject her Japanese heritage, including her birth name. More than a decade later, her life took another turn when a Fulbright grant sent her to teach in Japan, where she reconnected with her roots.
In From Thorns to Blossoms, Mitzi recounts her rich and varied life, from a childhood surrounded by barbed wire and hatred to a successful career as a high school English teacher and college instructor in English as a Second Language. Today, Asai descendants continue to tend the Hood River farm while the town confronts its shameful history. Originally published in 1990 as Made in Japan and Settled in Oregon, this revised and expanded edition describes the positive influence Mitzi’s immigrant parents had on their children, provides additional context for her story, and illuminates the personal side of a dark chapter in US history. It’s the remarkable story of a transformation from thorns into blossoms, pain into healing.
The Jackson County Rebellion explores a dramatic if little-known populist insurgency in the American West. Author Jeff LaLande takes a deep dive into a tumultuous uprising that captured national attention as it played out in rural Oregon. First tracing its roots back to the area’s tradition of protest, including the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, he focuses on Jackson County’s politics of upheaval during the worst days of the Great Depression. The broad strokes of the episode may be familiar to contemporary readers: Demagogues fanning rage — relentlessly accusing an elite of corruption and conspiracy. The strife-torn episode featured nativist and anti-Semitic elements.
The local press played a key role in the events. Two inflammatory newspapers, one owned by wealthy orchardist Llewellyn Banks and the other by politician Earl Fehl, became the vehicles by which these men won the loyalty of rural and working-class residents. Partners in demagoguery, Banks and Fehl created a movement — dubbed the “Good Government Congress” that very nearly took over county government through direct action, ballot theft, and threats of violence. Among those opposing the two men was Harvard-educated Robert Ruhl, owner/editor of the Medford Mail-Tribune, who faced off against Banks and Fehl. Despite boycotts and threats of sabotage. Ruhl ran a resolute editorial campaign against the populist threat in his Mail-Tribune, which won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on the uprising.
The rebellion blazed hotly but not for long. Its end was marked by the arrest of its leaders after the fiercely contested 1932 election and by Banks’s murder of the police officer sent to arrest him. Placing the Jackson County Rebellion squarely within America’s long tradition of populist uprisings against the perceived sins of an allegedly corrupt, affluent local elite, LaLande argues that this little-remembered episode is part of a long history of violent conflict in the West that continues today.
Keeping Oregon Green is a new history of the signature accomplishments of Oregon’s environmental era: the revitalization of the polluted Willamette River, the Beach Bill that preserved public access to the entire coastline, the Bottle Bill that set the national standard for reducing roadside litter, and the nation’s first comprehensive land use zoning law. To these case studies is added the largely forgotten tale of what would have been Oregon’s second National Park, intended to preserve the Oregon Dunes as one of the country’s first National Seashores.
Through the detailed study of the historical, political, and cultural contexts of these environmental conflicts, Derek Larson uncovers new dimensions in familiar stories linked to the concepts of “livability” and environmental stewardship. Connecting events in Oregon to the national environmental awakening of the 1960s and 1970s, the innovative policies that carried Oregon to a position of national leadership are shown to be products of place and culture as much as politics. While political leaders such as Tom McCall and Bob Straub played critical roles in framing new laws, the advocacy of ordinary citizens—farmers, students, ranchers, business leaders, and factory workers—drove a movement that crossed partisan, geographic, and class lines to make Oregon the nation’s environmental showcase of the 1970s.
Drawing on extensive archival research and source materials, ranging from poetry to congressional hearings, Larson’s compelling study is firmly rooted in the cultural, economic, and political history of the Pacific Northwest. Essential reading for students of environmental history and Oregon politics, Keeping Oregon Green argues that the state’s environmental legacy is not just the product of visionary leadership, but rather a complex confluence of events, trends, and personalities that could only have happened when and where it did.
When Louise Wagenknecht’s family arrived in the remote logging town of Happy Camp in 1962, a boundless optimism reigned. Whites and Indians worked together in the woods and the lumber mills of northern California’s Klamath country. Logging and lumber mills, it seemed, would hold communities together forever.
But that booming prosperity would come to an end. Looking back on her teenage years spent along the Klamath River, Louise Wagenknecht recounts a vanishing way of life. She explores the dynamics of family relationships and the contradictions of being female in a western logging town in the 1960s. And she paints an evocative portrait of the landscape and her relationship with it.
Light on the Devils is a captivating memoir of place. It will appeal to general readers interested in the rural West, personal memoir, history, and natural history.
Tree sitters. Logger protests. Dying timber towns. An iconic species on the brink. The Timber Wars consumed the Pacific Northwest in the late 1980s and early1990s and led political leaders to ask scientists for a solution. The Northwest Forest Plan was the result.
For most of the twentieth century, the central theme of federal forest management in the Pacific Northwest had been logging old-growth forests to provide a sustained yield of timber. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, a series of studies by young scientists highlighted the destructive impact of that logging on northern spotted owls, salmon, and the old-growth ecosystem itself.
Combining this new science with newly minted environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act, environmental activists obtained court injunctions to stop old-growth logging on federal land, setting off a titanic struggle in the Pacific Northwest to find a way to accommodate conservation imperatives as well as the logging that provided employment for tens of thousands of people. That effort involved years of controversy and debate, federal courts, five science assessments, Congress, and eventually the president of the United States. It led to creation of the Northwest Forest Plan, which sharply and abruptly shifted the primary goal of federal forestry toward conserving the species and ecosystems of old-growth forests. Scientists went from spectators to planners and guides, employing their latest scientific findings and expertise to create a forest plan for 20 million acres that would satisfy the courts. The largest upheaval in federal forest management in history had occurred, along with a precipitous decline in timber harvest, and there was no going back.
In this book, three of the scientists who helped craft that change tell the story as they know it: the causes, development, adoption, and implementation of the Northwest Forest Plan. The book also incorporates personal reflections from the authors, short commentaries and histories from key figures— including spotted owl expert Eric Forsman—and experiences from managers who implemented the Plan as best they could. Legal expert Susan Jane M. Brown helped interpret court cases and Debora Johnson turned spatial data into maps. The final chapters cover the Plan’s ongoing significance and recommendations for conserving forest and aquatic ecosystems in an era of megafires and climate change.
Covering people and events from 1854 to the present day, this definitive history of Multnomah County provides compelling details about public works triumphs and political scandals.
In this deeply researched volume, Stephen Dow Beckham brings together commentary by Native Americans about the events affecting their lives in Oregon. Now available in paperback for the first time, this volume presents first-person accounts of events threatening, changing, and shaping the lives of Oregon Indians, from “first encounters” in the late eighteenth century to modern tribal economies.
The book's seven thematic sections are arranged chronologically and prefaced with introductory essays that provide the context of Indian relations with Euro-Americans and tightening federal policy. Each of the nearly seventy documents has a brief introduction that identifies the event and the speakers involved. Most of the book's selections are little known. Few have been previously published, including treaty council minutes, court and congressional testimonies, letters, and passages from travelers’ journals.
Oregon Indians opens with the arrival of Euro-Americans and their introduction of new technology, weapons, and diseases. The role of treaties, machinations of the Oregon volunteers, efforts of the US Army to protect the Indians but also subdue and confine them, and the emergence of reservation programs to “civilize” them are recorded in a variety of documents that illuminate nineteenth-century Indian experiences.
Twentieth-century documents include Tommy Thompson on the flooding of the Celilo Falls fishing grounds in 1942, as well as Indian voices challenging the "disastrous policy of termination," the state's prohibition on inter-racial marriage, and the final resting ground of Kennewick Man. Selections in the book's final section speak to the changing political atmosphere of the late twentieth century, and suggest that hope, rather than despair, became a possibility for Oregon tribes.
The Nestucca Valley is a small watershed, tucked away in one corner of a county in far western Oregon. There are no incorporated towns, and cows outnumber humans. It has long been a place without a written history, yet its past offers many surprising twists on received wisdom about rural economies. In crisp prose and succinct chapters, Persistent Callings carries readers from aboriginal times to the present, illustrating the wisdom of seasonal labor, the complex relationships between work and identity, and the resilience of rural economics across more than a century of almost continual change.
Life in this watershed, known to locals as “South County,” has always been demanding. Farming, fishing, and logging were difficult occupations, but work had deeper meanings. Challenges arrived in many forms, including climate shifts, market crashes, regulatory changes, and industry consolidations. Residents’ ability to innovate was their greatest resource, and their persistence helps us to recognize the callings they pursued.
During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, disruptions came more quickly, and they coincided with infusions of capital that dramatically altered the structure of employment, with devastating results for the valley’s hardest working residents. Unemployment and poverty skyrocketed while health and life expectancy dropped to alarming levels. Moreover, the arrival of retirees and rise of environmental amenities actually exacerbated some ecological problems. Little in this history plays out as expected, and much of it will make readers reconsider how they think about the social, economic, and environmental contours of rural life in the American West.
William “Bill” Sumio Naito (1925–1996) was a remarkable and visionary individual—the Portland-born son of Japanese immigrants who became one of the city’s most significant business and civic leaders. Every day thousands of people drive on Naito Parkway alongside Portland’s Waterfront Park, yet little has been written about the man for whom it was named.
In this first biography, Erica Naito-Campbell, Bill’s granddaughter, shows how his story is also the story of Portland, the city he loved. Naito’s life, from the Great Depression and World War II through Portland’s rebirth in the 1970s and its profound growth, tracked most of the major events in the city and was the catalyst for many of them. Through hard-earned success in importing and real estate with his brother Sam, Naito came to wield considerable power in the city, and his leadership led to much of what we consider iconic Portland today: the “Portland Oregon” sign near the Burnside Bridge, the annual Christmas tree in Pioneer Courthouse Square, and Harbor Drive’s conversion to Waterfront Park.
Naito’s name became synonymous with civic leadership, whether it was growing Portland’s urban tree canopy, revitalizing its downtown, or preserving historic buildings. But less is known about his difficult childhood—with a father who worked twelve-hour days and a mother whose treatment of him was harsh at best—and the racism he endured during World War II. After the expulsion of Japanese Americans following Pearl Harbor and his military service in Occupied Japan, Naito overcame great emotional turmoil to return to Portland and become one of its greatest change-makers.
Erica Naito-Campbell uses anecdotes, rich details, and previously unknown stories about Bill Naito to bring Portland’s history to life—while acknowledging that the cost of his success was a family rife with resentments and envy. Her book reveals the emotional wounds that drove Naito to become one of Portland’s most inspiring civic leaders, a pivotal player in the city’s journey from a moribund downtown to a national model for livability, urban renewal, and historic preservation.
Oregon is commonly perceived to have little, let alone notable, South Asian history. Yet in the early 1900s Oregon was at the center of two entwined quests for Indian independence and civic belonging that rocked the world.
Punjabi Rebels of the Columbia River traces the stories of the radical Indian independence organization known as Ghadar and Bhagat Singh Thind’s era-defining US Supreme Court citizenship case. Ghadar sought the overthrow of India’s British colonizers while Thind utilized sanctioned legal channels to do so. Despite widely differing strategies, both the movement and the man were targeted, often in coordination, by the highest levels of the US and British governments. The empires’ united message: India would not be an independent country and Indians could not be citizens. In the decades that followed, it was a verdict Indians refused to abide.
Johanna Ogden’s detailed history of migrants’ experience expands the time frame, geographic boundaries, and knowledge of the conditions and contributions of Indians in North America. It is the story of a people’s awakening amid a rich community of international workers in an age of nationalist uprisings. To understand why one of the smallest western Indian settlements became a resistance center, Punjabi Rebels mines the colonial underpinnings of labor, race, and place-making and their regional and global connections, rendering a history of whiteness and labor as much as of Indian-ness and migration. The first work to rejoin the lived experience of Thind and Ghadar activists, Punjabi Rebels complicates our understanding not just of the global fight for Indian political rights but of multi-racial democracy.
Every American is co-owner of the most magnificent estate in the world—federal public forests, grazing lands, monuments, national parks, wildlife refuges, and other public places. The writer Wallace Stegner famously referred to public lands as “America’s best idea,” but there have always been some who oppose the idea for ideological reasons, or because they have a vested economic interest. In the current decade, federal public lands have been under physical threat as never before, with armed standoffs and takeovers that the US government has proved stunningly unsuccessful at prosecuting in federal courts.
One such incident was the takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon, in 2016. Armed militants seized the headquarters of the refuge for forty-one days and occupied the community for three months. Militants threatened and harassed local residents, pledging to “give back” the land to unnamed “rightful owners” in their effort to enact a fringe interpretation of the US Constitution.
Drawing on more than two years of intensive fieldwork, Sagebrush Collaboration shows that the militants failed in their objectives because the sensible and hardworking citizens of Harney County had invested decades in collaboratively solving the very problems that the militia used to justify their anti–federal government revolution.
In Sagebrush Collaboration, Peter Walker offers the first book-length study of why the 2016 takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge failed. His nuanced and deeply researched account provides the full context for the takeover, including the response from local and federal officials and the grassroots community resistance. It will be essential reading for years to come for anyone who wants to understand the ongoing battle over the future of America’s public lands.
The true story of an anarchist colony on a remote Puget Sound peninsula, Trying Home traces the history of Home, Washington, from its founding in 1896 to its dissolution amid bitter infighting in 1921.
As a practical experiment in anarchism, Home offered its participants a rare degree of freedom and tolerance in the Gilded Age, but the community also became notorious to the outside world for its open rejection of contemporary values. Using a series of linked narratives, Trying Home reveals the stories of the iconoclastic individuals who lived in Home, among them Lois Waisbrooker, an advocate of women’s rights and free love, who was arrested for her writings after the assassination of President McKinley; Jay Fox, editor of The Agitator, who defended his right to free speech all the way to the Supreme Court; and Donald Vose, a young man who grew up in Home and turned spy for a detective agency.
Justin Wadland weaves his own discovery of Home—and his own reflections on the concept of home—into the story, setting the book apart from a conventional history. After discovering the newspapers published in the colony, Wadland ventures beyond the documents to explore the landscape, travelling by boat along the steamer route most visitors once took to the settlement. He visits Home to talk with people who live there now.
Meticulously researched and engagingly written, Trying Home will fascinate scholars and general readers alike, especially those interested in the history of the Pacific Northwest, utopian communities, and anarchism.
Philip Garrison says his book of essays is “in praise of mixed feelings,” particularly the mixed feelings he and his neighbors have toward the places they came from. His neighborhood is the Columbia Plateau, one of many North American nodes of immigration. Following a meandering, though purposeful trail, Garrison catches hillbillies and newer Mexican arrivals in ambiguous, wary encounters on a set four hundred years in the making, built on a foundation of Native American displacement. Garrison is the product of the earlier surge of new arrivals: from the 1930s to the 1970s, those he calls hillbillies left such mid-nation states as Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, and the Dakotas for the West. The more recent wave, from 1990 to 2010, came mostly from the central plateau of Mexico. These are folks with whom Garrison communes in multiple ways. Anecdotes from sources as varied as pioneer diaries, railroad promotions, family Bibles, Wikipedia, and local gossip “portray the region's immigration as a kind of identity makeover, one that takes the form first of breakdown, then of reassembly, and finally of renewal.” Garrison’s mix of slangy memoir and anthropological field notes shines light on the human condition in today’s West.
Stewart Holbrook was a high school dropout who emerged from logging camps to become the author of three dozen books, the Pacific Northwest’s foremost storyteller, one of the nation’s most popular historians, and a satirical painter known as “Mr. Otis.”
Today readers are rediscovering Holbrook’s colorful and irreverent accounts of Pacific Northwest history. Wildmen, Wobblies, and Whistle Punks collects twenty-six of Holbrook’s best writings about the region. Combining solid scholarship with humor and a gift for celebrating the offbeat, Holbrook’s stories record a vibrant, often overlooked side of Northwest history. Here are forgotten scandals and murders; stories of forest fires, floods, and other calamities; tales of loggers and life in the logging camps; and profiles of various lowbrow characters—radicals, do-gooders, dreamers, schemers, and zealots.
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