"Superbly reported and written with clarity, insight, and great skill" ("The Washington Post Book World"), this account of Harden's journey down the Columbia River--part history, part memoir, part lament--presents a personal narrative of rediscovery joined with a narrative of exploitation: of Native Americans, of endangered salmon, of nuclear waste, and of a once-wild river now tamed to puddled remains.

Details the destruction of the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest by well-intentioned Americans who saw only the benefits of the dam-building, power plant and irrigation projects, not realizing the longterm effects of killing the river.

Boatman's Quarterly review: "It will keep you on the edge of your easy chair. You'll want to read this Amos Burg book by Vince Welch more than once, that's for sure." CLICK HERE to download the first 45 pages from, The Last Voyageur (Provide us with a little information and we'll send your download directly to your inbox) “What is this thing in me that enables me to leave comforts and a wide variety of entertainments and feel a strange satisfaction wandering down a cheerless and indifferent river, enduring hardships and eating very little and exposed to all sorts of weather . . . tonight even as I sit shivering and listening to the patter of the rain, I see myself in many places all over the world, wandering like a gull on the winds, working with the ideals of Truth and Beauty as part of my vision to bring these things back with me for other people to see.” -- Amos Burg, Yukon River, July 1928 * Amos Burg ran all the major rivers of the West when they still flowed freely and potential danger was just around the next bend * Part early 20th-century history, part adventure, part biography of the West’s first commercial outdoor guide Amos Burg (1901--1986), a native of Portland, Oregon, was the first to complete transits of the free-flowing, undammed Snake and Columbia Rivers by canoe, and in 1938 he became the first to navigate the length of the Colorado River in a rubber raft. In his daring explorations of waterways from the Southwest up through Canada and into Alaska, Burg is considered to be the only person known to have run all major Western rivers from source to mouth. In The Last Voyageur: Amos Burg and the Rivers of the West author Vince Welch, himself a river guide, weaves a passionate and well-researched narrative using extensive material from Burg’s own rich archives. History buffs, paddlers, and adventure readers alike will delight in this remarkable regional history of the larger-than-life Burg, a quintessential man of the American West and one of the last “voyageurs” of North America’s great waterways.

"Superbly reported and written with clarity, insight, and great skill." —Washington Post Book World After two decades, Washington Post journalist Blaine Harden returned to his small-town birthplace in the Pacific Northwest to follow the rise and fall of the West’s most thoroughly conquered river. To explore the Columbia River and befriend those who collaborated in its destruction, he traveled on a monstrous freight barge sailing west from Idaho to the Grand Coulee Dam, the site of the river’s harnessing for the sake of jobs, electricity, and irrigation. A River Lost is a searing personal narrative of rediscovery joined with a narrative of exploitation: of Native Americans, of endangered salmon, of nuclear waste, and of a once-wild river. Updated throughout, this edition features a new foreword and afterword.

For thousands of years, Pacific Northwest Indians fished, bartered, socialized, and honored their ancestors at Celilo Falls, part of a nine-mile stretch of the Long Narrows on the Columbia River. Although the Indian community of Celilo Village survives to this day as Oregon's oldest continuously inhabited town, with the construction of The Dalles Dam in 1957, traditional uses of the river were catastrophically interrupted. Most non-Indians celebrated the new generation of hydroelectricity and the easy navigability of the river "highway" created by the dam, but Indians lost a sustaining center to their lives when Celilo Falls was inundated. Death of Celilo Falls is a story of ordinary lives in extraordinary circumstances, as neighboring communities went through tremendous economic, environmental, and cultural change in a brief period. Katrine Barber examines the negotiations and controversies that took place during the planning and construction of the dam and the profound impact the project had on both the Indian community of Celilo Village and the non-Indian town of The Dalles, intertwined with local concerns that affected the entire American West: treaty rights, federal Indian policy, environmental transformation of rivers, and the idea of "progress."

This book is about the lived experiences of first-generation Latino and Latina (Latinx) students going to college in Washington state, combined with an analysis of immigration enforcement practices. The experiences of resilience and creativity exhibited by Latinx students offer a stark contrast with the human rights violations by law enforcement agents, whose collaboration with immigration enforcement is against the law in Washington state. The book explores the work of the University of Washington Center for Human Rights, particularly its work to defend and promote immigrants’ rights in Washington state. The Center documents the collaboration and information sharing of local and state law enforcement with federal immigration enforcement agencies, which predominantly target Latinx communities in Eastern Washington. Since such collaboration and information sharing is now illegal under Washington state laws, the findings of the work of the Center for Human Rights can be used by frontline human rights organizations in Washington state to advocate for stronger compliance by local and state law enforcement, and stronger protection of immigrants’ rights. In addition to documenting the work of the Center for Human Rights, this book offers a collection of oral histories from UW students or alumni from Eastern Washington who self-identify as Latinx. Latinx is a gender-neutral term for individuals who descend from Latin American ancestry and culture. These Latinx stories offer a glimpse of the rich lived experiences in some of the communities that suffer the racial profiling and abuses of immigration enforcement. These are the communities of migrant farmworkers that tend and harvest the fruits and agricultural produce of Washington, the communities of origin of many of the students at the University of Washington.

Many of the world’s major cities sprang up on the banks of rivers. Used for water, food, irrigation, transportation, and power, rivers sustain life and connect the world together, but most of us think of them simply as waterways that must be crossed on the way to another place. Using four European and two North American rivers as examples, A Story of Six Rivers considers the place of rivers in our world and emphasizes the inextricable links between history, culture, and ecology. Peter Coates explores six rivers, chosen as examples of the types of rivers found on the planet: the Danube, the second-longest river in Europe; the Spree, which flows through Berlin; the Po, which cuts eastward across northern Italy; the Mersey in northwest England; the Yukon, which runs through Canada and Alaska; and the Los Angeles in California. Creating a series of river biographies, Coates gives voice to each of these bodies of water, exploring how rivers nurture us, provide cultural and economic opportunities, and pose threats to our everyday lives. He challenges recent narratives that paint rivers as the victims of abuse, pollution, and damage at the hands of humans, focusing on change rather than devastation. Describing how humans and rivers form a symbiotic—and sometimes mutually destructive—relationship, Coates argues that rivers illustrate the limits of human authority and that their capacity to inspire us is as strong as our ability to pollute them. An intimate portrait of the way these bodies of water inform our lives, A Story of Six Rivers will make us reconsider the streams and tributaries we traverse each day.