New Releases
Horse Camping [Revised Edition]
George B. Hatley
Photographs by Lewis Portnoy
Foreword by Juli S. Thorson
Horse camping has long been part of Pacific Northwest lore. The Nez Perce used horses as transportation, and frontier fur trappers also loaded and rode the animals. The journals of these mountain men often contain glowing accounts of their nomadic lifestyle and exhibit a profound appreciation of their surroundings. Today, people still long to experience pristine wilderness and enjoy the simple pleasures nature offers. Pack trips allow individuals of many ages and physical abilities to reach glorious backcountry they would never see otherwise.
George Hatley has a deep connection to the region and its early pioneers. As a boy, he learned that his great uncle had been involved in the Misery Hill scrimmage of the Nez Perce war, and that the Native Americans were riding Appaloosas. He listened to his grandfather recount his Palouse country arrival by wagon train in 1877, describing a beautiful expanse with stirrup-high grass waving in the wind like ocean surf. But the grand prairie sea became farmland, and so during harvest season, young George was fascinated by teams of 33 horses pulling combines. He eventually became a cattle rancher and trail guide, indulging both his adventurous spirit and his passion for horses by leading numerous camping trips amid the Northwest's magnificent mountains and canyons.
Originally released in 1981 and again in 1992, George Hatley's common-sense manual is considered a classic. In his amiable, practical voice, he shares both successes and oversights, and reveals observations and experiences from years as an outfitter. He covers trip planning, horses, tack, gear, food, and other aspects of advanced preparation. He discusses horse hauling and packing for the journey. Finally, he provides information about setting out on the trail, establishing a site, and life in camp. This new WSU Press edition has been skillfully updated by Juli S. Thorson, Editor and Associate Publisher of Horse & Rider magazine.
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Shaper of Seattle
Reginald Heber Thomson’s Pacific Northwest
William H. Wilson
“His achievements are woven into Seattle and the surrounding region so durably that they are taken for granted even as Puget Sound, Lake Washington, and Mount Rainier.”—Roy O. Hadley
Young, ambitious, and college-educated, Reginald Heber Thomson was eager to make a big impression. Seattle was brimming with opportunity, but when his steamer docked at Yesler’s Wharf in 1881, the view was dismal. Nondescript wood-framed buildings and plank sidewalks sprawled along muddy streets. Thomson may have smelled the Puget Sound metropolis before he saw it. Utilities were crude to nonexistent. Pipes dumped the untreated contents of chamber pots and tin bathtubs straight into Elliott Bay, and a multitude of rats scurried around the piers. Recalling that earlier time, he wrote, “Looking at local surrounds, I felt that Seattle was in a pit, that to get anywhere we would be compelled to climb out of it if we could.”
Soon, Thomson was surveying for his cousin’s firm. He quickly rose to partner and mingled with Seattle’s elite. In 1884 he was appointed city surveyor, and in 1892, city engineer. By then the booming population was in dire need of a workable sewage system and a clean, reliable water supply. Thomson delivered both and more, aided by his keen ability to select capable subordinates. He installed drain pipes and sewers where others had failed, and his gravity-powered Cedar River project replaced water pumped from turbid Lake Washington. To improve the ability of horses and carts to transport goods, he leveled several steep hills and filled the worst hollows. His municipal power plant lit homes, businesses, and streets.
Later, he became a civic leader and was involved with the Port of Seattle and the Chittenden locks. For decades, Thomson labored diligently on behalf of urban dwellers, and is still responsible for much of the Emerald City’s infrastructure. In addition to sewers, water, and regraded streets, the progressive, legendary engineer also straightened and dredged waterways, reclaimed tideflats, and installed countless miles of tunnels, bridges, and pavement.
Thomson succeeded despite a tenure filled with intense financial pressure, meticulous audits, and political and public controversy, such as the Boxley Creek flood that washed away a small lumbering community. Both a workaholic and a devoted family man, he possessed extraordinary intelligence, energy, integrity, and perseverance. He also was driven by his religious and political convictions. In Shaper of Seattle, author William H. Wilson has produced a comprehensive, critical examination, exploring key events and forces that shaped Reginald Heber Thomson throughout his youth, career, personal life, and waning years.
Read the Seattle Times review by book critic Michael Upchurch or listen to the author's talk at the Seattle Public Library.
Slick as a Mitten
Ezra Meeker’s Klondike Enterprise
Dennis M. Larsen
After braving the Oregon Trail in 1852, Ezra Meeker built a fortune in hop farming and brokering in the Puget Sound country. He platted Puyallup, serving as the town’s first mayor and key businessman. Then suddenly in the 1890s, a devastating scourge of aphids followed by a national economic depression, swept his assets away, “slick as a mitten.” Nevertheless, when Meeker’s Puyallup bank teetered on failure, he rescued friends and neighbors by tapping into his own diminishing capital to return funds to depositors.
The gold stampede of 1898 held renewed prospects for the financially ruined. Despite his advanced age, the daring pioneer ventured to the treacherous Klondike four times, transporting and selling 100 tons of vegetables, potatoes, dried foods, and canned goods in miners’ camps and at hastily built inns and restaurants. The arduous hauling of freight at the height of the gold rush required wagons, packhorses, human backs, scows, and dog teams. Meanwhile, wife Eliza Jane remained in Puyallup overseeing the manufacture of canned foods, granulated eggs, and dehydrated vegetables for Ezra’s “Log Cabin Grocery” in Dawson City.
Ezra was joined in the north by six family members, including an infant grandson, Wilfred, who accompanied him to the Yukon in 1900. Three years of letters, most from Ezra to his beloved Eliza Jane, relate the details of his risky schemes, keen insights, and intriguing—from business and mining pursuits, to keeping warm through sub-arctic winters, to the burying of a son in a Dawson cemetery. Slick as a Mitten adds a new voice to the history of the Klondike.
Read the review in North Columbia Monthly.
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Women's Votes, Women's Voices
The Campaign for Equal Rights in Washington
Shanna Stevenson
The right of citizens to vote is a pillar of democracy—a mainstay denied to Washington women until they united in a campaign to enact change. Suffragettes briefly achieved the right to vote through an 1883 legislative act, only to have a Territorial Supreme Court decision declare it invalid. Once again, women formed clubs and embarked on a grassroots crusade. They canvassed neighborhoods, circulated petitions, published a newspaper, conducted debates, sold a cookbook, participated in fairs, and more. Finally, in 1910, suffragettes persuaded Washington men to ratify a state constitutional amendment granting permanent voting rights for women, only the fifth state to do so. Their success revitalized the national movement, inspiring activists struggling toward another pivotal goal, the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Approved in 1920, the revision secured voting rights for women across
But the story does not end there. Woman suffrage was a harbinger of social change. Females enrolled in higher education in record numbers, became more directly involved in community affairs, and increasingly joined such professions as social work, medicine, and architecture. By 1910, women dominated the office workplace, comprising 83 percent of typists and stenographers.
Since gaining the vote, female Washingtonians have regularly exercised their voice in government—addressing the concerns of women, children, and families, and continuing to strive for equal rights.
Women’s Votes, Women’s Voices provides a comprehensive summary of the Washington woman suffrage movement and presents vignettes on many of the state’s most active leaders, such as May Arkwright Hutton and Emma Smith DeVoe, along with numerous illustrations.
Author Shanna Stevenson is a historian living in Olympia, Washington, and coordinator of the Washington Women’s History Consortium project.
Published by the Washington State Historical Society
Read Mike Dillon's review in City Living's BookBeat.
Greenscapes
Olmsted's Pacific Northwest
Joan Hockaday
“Seattle possesses extraordinary landscape advantages in having a great abundance and variety of water views and views of wooded hills and distant mountains and snow-capped peaks. I do not know of any place where the natural advantages for parks are better than here. They can be made very attractive and will be, in time, one of the things that will make Seattle known all over the world.”—John Charles Olmsted, 1903
Like his famous stepfather and mentor Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed New York’s Central Park, landscape architect John Charles Olmsted believed that pastoral spaces were integral to a healthy urban life. The success of Central Park brought attention to the company and sparked a nationwide movement to beautify cities. By 1884, John Charles Olmsted had become a full partner in the Olmsted firm. In 1903, he traveled to Portland and Seattle, submitting master plans for park systems in both. He produced designs for several of the region’s university campuses and smaller cities, as well as Spokane’s premier Riverside Park System. Yet success was jeopardized by political and practical mine fields such as changing park boards, escalating land costs, and dwindling funds. John Charles Olmsted’s finesse with members of the societal elite influenced property purchases, political appointments, and municipal funding levels.
Careful attention to natural vistas, topography, and native plants allowed his verdant havens to provide a renewing connection to the outdoors. Each green retreat was unique, compatible with surroundings and intended uses, and skillfully crafted to take full advantage of a specific site. Some had playgrounds, ball fields, and expansive lawns. Others provided leafy passageways for travel by foot, horse, or car. Hilly woodlands were often layered to offer a lush, textural backdrop with dappled areas of light and shade. Meticulous, intensely observant, industrious, and visionary, he left a legacy that is still enjoyed daily by people across the Pacific Northwest.
“One hundred years later, when we enter an Olmsted-designed park, despite more traffic and development than even those visionaries could probably imagine, we feel submerged in solitude, shelter and a dose of peace sufficient to refresh even the 21st-century human spirit.”—Valerie Easton, Pacific Northwest Magazine
Read the Seattle Times review by book critic Michael Upchurch.
Forthcoming Titles
Spring 2010
Season of Suffering
Coming of Age in Occupied France, 1940–45
Nicole H. Taflinger
Born in 1927, Nicole Braux’s earliest recollections occur in the French city of Nancy, where her father owned and operated a hotel and restaurant. Her charming reflections paint a picture of a romantic culture still wounded by the First World War.
Nicole was twelve when her father was recalled into the reserves in 1939. Within months, she watched German troops invade. “We peeked above the window sill and saw them…Our imaginations hadn’t exaggerated; they looked as evil, if not more so, than we’d expected!”
Little by little, the Braux family adjusted to life under occupation. They experienced recurrent air raid alerts, Nazi propaganda, rationing, the Black Market, and bombings. As they struggled simply to acquire food and keep warm, thinking of the future became irrelevant. Teachers, friends, employers, priests, nuns, and doctors disappeared in the night. Relationships became veiled in worry, suspicion and secrecy.
French citizens quietly resisted. They concocted strategies to elude curfew. They purposely dressed to offend Germans, donning short skirts and makeup, and choosing the bright colors of the French flag. They sold tainted food to the despised oppressors. As the fighting drew ever closer, desperation and terror increased, but miraculous events brought hope.
Finally the inconceivable joy of liberation came. However, food remained scarce, the fate of her father still unknown, and now eighteen, Nicole found herself deeply in love with Lieutenant Ancel G. Taflinger, pilot for General George S. Patton.
Written decades ago but never published, the author’s guileless voice enhances her adolescent memories of the German occupation—an existence of fear, loss, suffering, and fierce hatred—and illustrates the immense emotional toll of war.
Available in June 2010
An Election for the Ages
Rossi vs. Gregoire, 2004
Trova Heffernan
Foreword by Secretary of State Sam Reed
As they voted in the November 2004 election, Washington State citizens were unaware that they were launching a stunning and controversial political episode. The chaotic primary, a public equally divided between two candidates, the soaring voter turnout, and the timing of Election Day all collided, creating the closest ballot result for any governor’s race in American history. Never before had an election for a statewide office required two recounts. In another first, litigation followed, calling into question the integrity and accuracy of the entire voting process. Whether Dino Rossi or Christine Gregoire would claim victory was finally decided in June of 2005. Out of 2.8 million votes cast, the winning margin—after the initial tally, a re-total by machine, and ultimately a manual recount—was a razor-thin 133 votes.
Written from the perspective of the Office of Secretary of State, An Election for the Ages offers a chronological profile of these dramatic events. It clarifies and explains interpretations of election statutes, court rulings, and the role of state officials, providing an inside look at how Secretary of State Sam Reed and his key executive and election staff supervised a heated political battle that reached beyond this particular race and to the rules of democracy itself.
Available in March 2010