After being slated to close as of December 31, 2024, Washington State University Press has a new home under the WSU Libraries and will continue publishing the wonderful titles that bring knowledge and enjoyment to so many. We are extremely grateful to our Provost and Interim Dean, and for the outpouring of support following the closure announcement. Read the complete article here.

Only a tiny percentage of the approximately 3,000 barns in Washington State are round. Enchanted by their beauty, complexity, and historical significance, Tom and Helen Bartuska have been researching, visiting, and photographing the Pacific Northwest’s round barns since the 1960s, shortly after Tom accepted a teaching position at Washington State University’s architecture department. “Barns—especially round barns—are unfortunately vanishing from the rural landscape, yet they have an important and fascinating tale to convey.  They are beautiful icons of our country’s landscape and are an important part of our history and cultural heritage,” the Bartuskas say.  Focusing on agricultural structures over 50 years old with at least two stories, the pair eventually compiled a list of 21 buildings and made it their mission to create a comprehensive inventory—recording who built each one and when, original and current uses, individual characteristics, construction details, and anecdotes they learned along the way. They compiled their work into a new book, Washington State’s Round Barns: Preserving a Vanishing Rural Heritage.

Since most of the barns were constructed in the early 1900s, the couple explored archives to gather historic photographs and paperwork. When possible, they also took interior and exterior photographs and talked with owners about each structure’s story, revisiting several sites to document how the barns changed over time. For example, Washington’s oldest known round barn was originally located on a hill overlooking Cathlamet and the Columbia River, but now sits in a field behind the town’s cemetery. It was built around a large live tree. After completion the tree was removed, but the cut-off trunk remains as an integral part of the roof.

In addition, the Bartuskas researched round barns’ fascinating history and development across the United States—including similarities and differences, various construction methods and designs, advantages and disadvantages, and the reasons they were built.  Perhaps surprisingly, one is that they were cheaper. Utilizing shared labor from extended family and neighbors made materials costs the largest expense. One early 1900s report calculated total materials savings for a 60-foot diameter round barn versus an equivalent sized plank-framed rectangular barn as $378.77, or 36%.

Sadly, the structures continue to succumb to economic and technological changes, as well as to fire, disrepair, and the forces of nature. Seven of the documented Washington barns no longer exist, and several of the remaining fourteen are in peril. Hoping to inspire others to help maintain, preserve, and restore these unique cultural icons, the authors added examples of successful re-use and creative conservation nationwide, along with ongoing efforts to save other types of barns, buildings, and rural communities.

About the authors:

Tom and Helen Bartuska have been interested in round barns and reanimating rural buildings and communities since their college days. Avid world travelers, they spent a year in Afghanistan after Tom received a Fulbright Award to teach at Kabul University. While there, Helen taught at an international primary school. They now reside in the Pacific Northwest and volunteer at IslandWood, a school nationally recognized for its outdoor programs and contemporary sustainable design. Tom received his Bachelor and Master of Architecture from the University of Illinois, and completed post graduate studies at the University of Manchester. After a forty-year teaching career, he is now a professor emeritus at Washington State University’s School of Architecture and Construction Management. Helen attended the University of Illinois and the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, and holds a BA in Home Economics, Child and Family Studies. She received her Montessori certification from England’s St. Nicholas Montessori Training Center, and taught young children for over two decades.

Our new poetry collection, A Muckleshoot Poetry Anthology: At the Confluence of the Green and White Rivers, curated by Susan Landgraf and just published by Washington State University Press, originated from a grant and more than a dozen workshops. The book showcases the work of two artists and more than fifty poets from different tribal heritages living on the Muckleshoot Indian Reservation.

Expressive and moving, the participants’ pieces are about searching and belonging, loss and finding. Many are stories of “what happened” and “why.” All share a common theme—a reaching back and a reaching forward—sometimes in the same poem. Composed by writers who range in age from elementary school to adult, they highlight Muckleshoot history and culture, but also spotlight individual histories, lessons, and beliefs.

“I had heard about a call for proposals from the Academy of American Poets and because I was Poet Laureate of Auburn, Washington, at that time, I thought it was a wonderful opportunity—but I had no project in mind. A week before the deadline, I woke up one morning with the thought that it was right here in my backyard, ‘We are the Muckleshoot,’” Landgraf explains. “I wanted to know more about who the Muckleshoot people are. I wanted to hear their voices in poetry, since I am a poet. To my knowledge, no one had published an anthology of poetry by people of the Tribe. So I applied. I got the request sent off four hours before the deadline,” Landgraf says. She received the grant in June 2020, just as the Covid 19 shutdown started, so it took several months to get the word out about the workshops and anthology. She finished curating the manuscript fourteen months later, in August 2021, and says her favorite parts were conducting the poetry workshops and having the poems come in. “It was like Valentine’s Day every time I found a new poet in my email.”

Muckleshoot is the Native name for the prairie on which the 6.128 square-mile reservation was established in 1857. Federally recognized as descendants of the Duwamish and Upper Puyallup people who inhabited Central Puget Sound thousands of years before non-Indian settlement, approximately 3,600 people live on the reservation located near the original confluence of the Green and White rivers. The two vital tributaries held the sacred salmon and served as “highways” for the people. Tribal members view the land as linked to their heritage, stating, “What we were lasts only as long as we carry the memory.” This new work helps carry the memory.

Poet and journalist Susan Landgraf’s next title, Journey of Trees, is set to be released in 2024. She taught at Highline College and Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, as well as at the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference. She served as Poet Laureate of Auburn, Washington, from 2018 to 2020.

HOW ONE WASHINGTON TERRITORIAL JUSTICE EXPLOITED HIS NETWORKS TO INFLUENCE THE REGION’S LEGAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY

“Perhaps the single most enlightening takeaway for me was the stark contrast between the legal landscape of Fitzhugh’s time and that of my own. No current judge would even consider hearing, on appeal, a case over which they had presided as the trial judge…an entertaining and educational read.”—Chuck Snyder, retired Whatcom County Superior Court Judge

Along with his privileged education, Edmund C. Fitzhugh was deeply shaped by his Virginia family’s history and ethics. “From the moment Fitzhugh’s tall leather boots struck the mud flats in front of the Roeder-Peabody Mill in 1854, the effects of the charismatic man on the infant community and Washington Territory were wide, and for some people, destructive,” says Candace A. Wellman, author of the new book, Man of Treacherous Charm: Territorial Justice Edmund C. Fitzhugh, the first full biography of a Washington Territory justice. His life offers insights into the people, politics, and legal practices—vastly different from today—of the territory and 19th century American West. “Fitzhugh was appointed to the federal bench while under indictment for murder. He made measured judicial decisions, helped organize the early Democratic Party machine in California and Washington, helped run a national presidential campaign, and fought heroically in the Civil War. And yet he died alone in a dingy hotel,” she adds.

Wellman’s interest in Fitzhugh began while she volunteered at the Washington State Archives and started to research her first book about indigenous womens’ roles in early Pacific Northwest history. One of the women married Fitzhugh, and Wellman noted his influence on the region’s legal and social history, along with his participation in important events in gold rush era San Francisco and Civil War Virginia. She decided to tell his story, traveling to Virginia to conduct research in Fitzhugh’s hometown and state repositories, as well as to the National Archives, San Francisco’s library, and multiple Washington State collections. Across two decades, she worked with dozens of collaborators.

Born into a wealthy, slave-owning colonial Virginia clan, Fitzhugh learned to focus on accumulating wealth and power. Following his West Point expulsion, he became a small-town lawyer and legislator before seeking fortune in San Francisco, where he associated with prominent attorneys and California Democrats. After coal was discovered in Washington Territory, a newly formed syndicate sent Fitzhugh north to open and manage a Bellingham Bay coal mine, and to sway that region’s Democrats. Elected Whatcom County’s first auditor, he used his position as the territory’s largest employer to benefit himself and the mine. He married two important indigenous women who brought their own kind of wealth and influence. He also exploited family, personal, and political networks to become the first local Indian agent during the Treaty War, a military aide to Governor Isaac Stevens, a district and supreme court justice, and a member of Brigadier General Eppa Hunton’s Civil War staff. After Fitzhugh kidnapped his two children and sent them to a distant white family, his indigenous wives deserted him. Two later marriages to women from prominent colonial families also did not last.

Idaho once had close to one thousand fire lookout towers—more than any other state in the Pacific Northwest. Today, that number has dropped dramatically as fire management increasingly relies on infrared and drone technology over human power. A new book, The Last Lookout on Dunn Peak: Fire Spotting in Idaho’s St. Joe National Forest by Nancy Sule Hammond, captures that lost era and recounts a life few will now experience—serving as a United Forest Service fire lookout.

When married high school sweethearts Don and Nancy arrived at his first post eight miles northwest of Avery, Idaho, in 1972, Nancy was puzzled. “I’d expected to find majestic conifers, lots of them,” she says. “But every mountain for miles around was covered in stubby scrub brush and weeds. Now I understood why that other lookout had quit. He was embarrassed to work in a forest without trees.” Their first task was to lug provisions and water up the Dunn Peak Lookout’s steep stairs to the fifteen-by-fifteen-foot cab two stories above the forest floor. The sparse furnishings included a single bed, small bookcase, cabinet, table, and a wood stove. There was no electricity or running water. A battery powered two-way Motorola radio was their only connection to the outside world. That night—engulfed by thunderbolts and filled with adrenalin—they faced their first storm. “It stalled right over our heads. I jumped at each lightning strike,” Nancy recalls.

Unless it was foggy or raining while he was on duty, the Forest Service required Don to conduct binocular searches from the catwalk for at least twenty minutes of every hour. He watched for smoke during the day and the glow of fire at night, and learned to distinguish between blue smoke plumes and white wisps of fog. Despite the primitive conditions, Don, Nancy, and their Dalmatian, Misty, settled in and came to love their lookout adventure. They spotted wildfires, were startled by their first cougar scream, encountered a wide variety of human and animal visitors, discovered delectable huckleberry patches, and simply enjoyed the enchanting beauty all around them.

Don was the last fire spotter to work there. The following year, the Forest Service decided to close the Dunn Peak Lookout, so the couple spent the summer of 1973 at the Middle Sister Peak tower, ten miles southeast of Avery. In The Last Lookout, Nancy shares stories from those two exciting, magical fire seasons, along with their return as volunteers 37 years later. Interspersing her accounts with regional fire history as well as dangers and details of the work, she journeys back to the narrow catwalks and stunning panoramas—a place where storms are building, the landscape is dry, and any lightning strike could ignite a raging wildfire.

Already a Montana State Book Award honor selection, Montana Modernists: Shifting Perceptions of Western Art written by Michele Corriel and published by Washington State University Press, is a finalist for two additional book awards, the 2023 High Plains Book Award in Art & Photography, and the 2023 Big Sky Award. Held in conjunction with the High Plains BookFest, the High Plains Book Awards recognize regional authors and/or literary works in a variety of categories that examine and reflect life on the High Plains. Introduced in 2019, the Big Sky Award is a special prize for the overall best book by a Montana author. Winners for all Book Awards will be announced at an awards event to be held in October 2023 in Billings, Montana. Each winner will receive $500 and a commemorative plaque.

The first book fully devoted to the topic, Montana Modernists presents stunning artwork and illuminates a little-known art movement. For many, Charles M. Russell’s paintings epitomize life in the West. But in twentieth-century postwar Montana, an avant-garde art movement—Montana Modernism—brewed. Its pioneers—ranchers, teachers, and professors Jessie Wilber, Frances Senska, Bill Stockton, Isabelle Johnson, Robert DeWeese, and Gennie DeWeese—created a community and pedagogy where, in stark contrast to stereotypical romanticized western art and frontier history themes, modernist ideas and art flourished, expanding traditional definitions of Western art.

Michele Corriel holds a Master’s in Art History and a PhD in American Studies/American Art from Montana State University, Bozeman. She has been an art writer for the last 17 years and is on the National Advisory Board for the Bozeman Art Museum.

Montana Modernists is full color, paperback, 10″ x 8″, 180 pages, and lists for $32.95. It is available through bookstores nationwide, direct from WSU Press online at https://wsupress.wsu.edu/product/montana-modernists/ or by phone at 800-354-7360. A nonprofit academic publisher associated with Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, WSU Press concentrates on telling unique, focused stories of the Northwest.

Noted western writer Wallace Stegner once stated that the most fruitful years for memoirists were those up to age eleven.  Author Richard W. Etulain thought about that statement for a long time before setting out to write his story, Boyhood Among the Woolies: Growing Up on a Basque Sheep Ranch, just released by Basalt Books. It covers his early youth on a sprawling sheep ranch twenty miles east of Ritzville and about seventy miles south of Spokane—eleven years that became the launching point for his later career as a western history professor.

Etulain notes that his experiences markedly differed from those of most young men from the surrounding farms and estates. About 100 miles to the east were the rich wheat ranches of the Palouse Country; to the west, smaller stock ranches and less fertile and more compact wheat ranches. Almost no sheepmen were in this area, save for the Escure brothers, his family’s next-door neighbors. “When I bragged about our 10,000-acre ranch (I didn’t mention that our best crop was rocks) to fellow Ritzville school students, they were convinced I was lying.”

Etulain’s memoir provides a glimpse of the annual patterns of life and activities on a sheep ranch. Lambing began in the coldest months of January and February, the sheep shearers arrived in April or early May, and the “trailing” to the mountains commenced in late May. Their four bands of sheep, totaling up to eight thousand ewes and lambs, grazed for about three months in the verdant mountains on or near the Idaho-Montana border.  Meanwhile, the Etulain family resided in their St. Maries summer home. The boys swam, roamed the neighborhood, and enjoyed getting into trouble.  In October, they returned to the sheep ranch and restarted the yearly routines.

“If the dry grazing lands dominated the ranch setting, the personalities of my Basque Dad and saintly Mother molded our family and home life. An immigrant from Spain, Dad was a driven, nonstop worker who tried, unsuccessfully, to convince his three rascal sons to become gung-ho ranchers. Instead, we preferred sports and ranch games. Mom was the peacemaker, helping her sons with schooling and generally encouraging our interests,” Etulain says. He recounts their experiences in the rural, one-room Lantz School with fewer than ten students, as well as later schools in Ritzville. Trips to town for Saturday shopping, music lessons (he dreaded them), the library (a favorite), and church on Sunday were invigorating breaks from the isolation. He also portrays the lives of their sheep herders and ranch workers, ranch animals, and delightful, frequent pranks. The final chapter traces what Etulain considers the major legacy of early sheep ranch years—his work ethic (from his Dad), interest in books (encouraged by his Mom and grandma), and fascination with history, especially the American West, Abraham Lincoln, and the Basques.

A Washington State University Press book, Montana Modernists: Shifting Perceptions of Western Art by Michele Corriel, was one of three honor books chosen by the 2022 Montana Book Award Committee. The annual award recognizes literary and/or artistic excellence in a book written or illustrated by someone who lives in Montana, is set in Montana, or deals with Montana themes or issues. Presentations and a reception for the four winning authors will take place on April 12, during the Montana Library Association Conference in Billings, Montana. Other winners include On a Benediction of Wind: Poems and Photographs, which won the main award, as well as Lucky Turtle, and The River You Touch: Making a Life on Moving Water, the other two honor titles.

The first book fully devoted to the topic, Montana Modernists presents stunning artwork and illuminates a little-known avant-garde movement—Montana Modernism—that began in twentieth-century postwar Montana. Its pioneers—ranchers, teachers, and professors Jessie Wilber, Frances Senska, Bill Stockton, Isabelle Johnson, Robert DeWeese, and Gennie DeWeese—created a community and pedagogy where, in stark contrast to stereotypical romanticized western art and frontier history themes, modernist ideas and art flourished, expanding traditional definitions of Western art. Divided into three parts, Corriel’s exploration concentrates on place, teaching/artistic lineage, and community.

From artist, writer, and Montana Governor’s Arts Award recipient Gordon McConnell’s viewpoint, “This book is singular, a milestone. It illuminates a precinct of western American art history that has been neglected by scholars up until now.” According to former curator of Art and Photography at the Museum of the Rockies Steven Jackson, “Montana Modernists presents important biographical histories of six Montana artists for the first time in one book, and provides valuable context for understanding how modernism evolved in Montana from the influences of artists like Cezanne to the movements of Dada, cubism, abstract expressionism, and the Bauhaus.”

Author Michele Corriel holds a Master’s in Art History and a PhD in American Studies/American Art from Montana State University, Bozeman. She has been an art writer for the last 17 years and is on the National Advisory Board for the Bozeman Art Museum.

Montana Modernists is full color, paperback, 10″ x 8″, 208 pages, and lists for $32.95. It is available through bookstores nationwide, direct from WSU Press online at https://wsupress.wsu.edu/product/montana-modernists/ or by phone at 800-354-7360. A nonprofit academic publisher associated with Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, WSU Press concentrates on telling unique, focused stories of the Northwest.