Located on the north shore of Fidalgo Island in Washington State's Puget Sound, Anacortes was founded by railroad surveyor Amos Bowman and named in honor of his wife, Anna Curtis; they promoted Anacortes as the "New York of the West." Thousands of years prior to the 1890s boom and bust, Fidalgo Island was--and still is--home to the Samish and the Swinomish tribes. White settlers arriving in the 1850s established farms and eventually wood mills, salmon canneries, and a vital downtown waterfront, transforming Anacortes into the "salmon-canning capital of the world" by the early 20th century. Japanese and Chinese cannery workers and Croatian and Scandinavian fishermen were among the many immigrants who brought their unique ways to the island. As a port town, Anacortes retained an open and adventuresome spirit, attracting new arrivals and visitors with the stunning natural beauty of the Northwest frontier. Commercial fishermen still ply local waters alongside a thriving maritime industry, whale-watching ecotourism, and a tradition of creative festivity.

A beautiful lake surrounded by virgin timber was enough for Dr. Hyacinthe P. Montborne to homestead here in 1884. He set up a shingle mill at Montborne in 1887, at the same time Hugh Walker was setting up a shingle mill in Walker Valley. With the establishment of the Seattle, Lake Shore & Eastern Railroad along the shoreline of Big Lake, the valley began to boom. The Day Lumber Company at Big Lake and the Nelson Neal Lumber Company at Montborne each established lumber mills. Their operations were far-reaching into the vast timberlands. With families homesteading near and far, the Finn Settlement, Ehrlich, Big Lake, Big Rock, and Baker Heights joined Walker Valley and the town of Montborne as communities. The mills are now gone, but the communities in the Big Lake Valley have survived, and generations of families, both old and new, continue to call it home.

When the railroad stretched its steel rails across the American West in the 1870s, it opened up a vast expanse of territory with very few people but enormous agricultural potential: a second Western frontier, the garden West. Agriculture quickly followed the railroads, making way for Kansas wheat and Colorado sugar beets and Washington apples. With this new agriculture came an unavoidable need for harvest workers—for hands to pick the apples, cotton, oranges, and hops; to pull and top the sugar beets; to fill the trays with raisin grapes and apricots; to stack the wheat bundles in shocks to be pitched into the maw of the threshing machine. These were not the year-round hired hands but transients who would show up to harvest the crop and then leave when the work was finished. Variously called bindlestiffs, fruit tramps, hoboes, and bums, these men—and women and children—were vital to the creation of the West and its economy. Amazingly, it is an aspect of Western history that has never been told. In Hoboes: Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps, and the Harvesting of the West, the award-winning historian Mark Wyman beautifully captures the lives of these workers. Exhaustively researched and highly original, this narrative history is a detailed, deeply sympathetic portrait of the lives of these hoboes, as well as a fresh look at the settling and development of the American West.

Remote, rugged, and spectacularly majestic, with stunning alpine meadows and jagged peaks that soar beyond ten thousand feet, North Cascades National Park is one of the Pacific Northwest’s crown jewels. Now, in the first full-length account, Lauren Danner chronicles its creation--just in time for the park’s fiftieth anniversary in 2018. The North Cascades range benefited from geographic isolation that shielded its mountains from extensive resource extraction and development. Efforts to establish a park began as early as 1892, but gained traction after World War II as economic affluence sparked national interest in wilderness preservation and growing concerns about the impact of harvesting timber to meet escalating postwar housing demands. As the environmental movement matured, a 1950s Glacier Peak study mobilized conservationists to seek establishment of a national park that prioritized wilderness. Concerned about the National Park Service’s policy favoring development for tourism and the United States Forest Service’s policy promoting logging in the national forests, conservationists leveraged a changing political environment and the evolving environmental values of the natural resource agencies to achieve the goal of permanent wilderness protection. Their grassroots activism became increasingly sophisticated, eventually leading to the compromise that resulted in the 1968 creation of Washington’s magnificent third national park.

The Lewis and Clark Expedition Among the Nez Perce Indians: The First Ethnographic Study in the Columbia Plateau - Robert Lee Sappington Loss, Transfer, and Reintroduction in the Use of Wild Plant Foods in the Upper Skagit Valley - Robert J. Theodoratus Abstracts of Papers, 41st Annual Northwest Anthropological Conference Religious Transformation Among the Snoqualmie Shakers - Kenneth D. Tollefson Floral Remains from the Pierce Chinese Mining Site, 10-CW-436 - Priscilla Wegars The Art and Iconology of the Dance in the Petroglyphs of the Northern Plains - Thomas H. Lewis