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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, horse-oriented Native Americans continued to use these routes; a host of white frontiersmen followed in their footsteps. Though their passage is now largely forgotten, many individuals prominent in Western history traveled this way and kept excellent records. In Forgotten Trails, the most noteworthy and exciting of these accounts have been edited into a single volume. Included are the adventures of Lewis and Clark and the Canadian explorer David Thompson, early missionaries such as the Reverend Samuel Parker, railroad surveyors and scient...
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In the Pacific Northwest, the Snake River and its wilderness tributaries were—as recently as a half century ago—some of the world’s greatest salmon rivers. Now, due to four federal dams, the salmon population has dropped close to extinction. Steven Hawley, journalist and self-proclaimed “river rat,” argues that the best hope for the Snake River lies in dam removal, a solution that pits the power companies and federal authorities against a collection of Indian tribes, farmers, fishermen, and river recreationists. The river’s health, as he demonstrates, is closely connected to local economies, freshwater rights, and energy independence. Challenging the notion of hydropower as a cheap, green source of energy, Hawley depicts the efforts being made on behalf of salmon by a growing army of river warriors. Their message, persistent but disarmingly simple, is that all salmon need is water in their rivers and a clear way home.
In Plowed Under, Andrew P. Duffin traces the transformation of the Palouse region of Washington and Idaho from land thought unusable and unproductive to a wealth-generating agricultural paradise, weighing the consequences of what this progress has wrought. During the twentieth century, the Palouse became synonymous with wheat, and the landscape was irrevocably altered. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, native vegetation is almost nonexistent, stream water is so dirty that it is often unfit for even livestock, and 94 percent of all land has been converted to agriculture. Commercial agriculture also created a less noticeable ecological change: soil erosion. While common to industrial ag...