NCW Libraries

"Murray Morgan's classic history of the Olympic Peninsula, originally published in 1955, evokes a remote American wilderness 'as large as the state of Massachusetts, more rugged than the Rockies, its lowlands blanketed by a cool jungle of fir and pine and cedar, its peaks bearing hundreds of miles of living ice that gave rise to swift rivers alive with giant salmon.' Drawing on historical research and personal tales collected from docks, forest trails,...

Indian inhabitants laid out the basic travel routes in central Washington's Grand Coulee country probably 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. In the early 1800s, the semi-nomadic Sinkiuse and other Native Americans continued to use these routes through the spectacular coulees. Following in their footsteps came a host of white explorers and frontiersmen - at first in a trickle, then in greater numbers by mid-century. Forgotten Trails is a compilation of the...

When nine-hundred-foot ice age floods carved the Columbia River Gorge through the Cascade Mountains to the sea, little space was left for man to form a highway of his own. It took an artist-poet-engineer extraordinaire to conquer this reluctant piece of real estate and produce the nation's first scenic highway. Meet Sam Hill, the mover and shaker, and Samuel Lancaster, the polio survivor, who turned modern engineering on its ear to create a "poem...