Phoebe Judson was a young bride in 1853 when she and her husband crossed the plains from Ohio to the Puget Sound area of Washington Territory. She was ninety-five when this book was first published in 1925. The years between were spent in “a pioneer’s search for an ideal home” and in living there, when it was finally found at the head of the Nooksack River, almost on the Canadian border. Phoebe Judson’s account of the journey west is based on daily diary entries detailing her fear, excitement, and exhaustion. At the end of the trail, the Judsons encountered hardships aplenty, causing them to abandon a farm and business in Olympia before their arrival in the Nooksack Valley. During the Indian Wars they holed up in a fort at Claquato. In time, Phoebe overcame her fear of the Indians, learned the Chinook language, and won their friendship. All this is told in vivid detail by a woman of great dignity and charm whom readers will long remember. Susan Armitage, professor of history at Washington State University, calls A Pioneer’s Search for an Ideal Home a “classic pioneering account,” important for its woman’s point of view.

A traveler's guide to Washington state, focusing on historical sites. Sections on various regions describe local history, with entries on towns and sites offering information on festivals, museums, and historic districts. Contains b&w photos, and a chronology. c. Book News Inc.

Probing diaries, letters, business journals, and newspapers for morsels of information, food historian Jackie Williams here follows pioneers from the earliest years of settlement in the Northwest--when smoldering logs in a fireplace stood in for a stove, and water had to be hauled from a stream or well--to the times when railroads brought Pacific Northwest cooks the latest ingredients and implements. The fifty-year journey described in The Way We Ate documents a change from a land with few stores and inadequate housing to one with business establishments bursting with goods and homes decorated with the latest finery. Like she did in her earlier acclaimed volume, Wagon Wheel Kitchens: Food on the Oregon Trail, Williams has in her latest book shed important new light on a little-understood aspect of our past. These tales of a pioneer wife bemoaning her husband’s gift of a cookbook when she really needed more food, or preparing sweets and savories for holiday celebrations when the kitchen was just a tiny space in a one-room log cabin, show another side of the grim-faced pioneers portrayed in movies. Here we encounter real American history and culture, one that vividly portrays the daily lives of the people who won the West--not in Hollywood gun battles, but in the kitchens and fields of a world that has disappeared. Interlacing a lively narrative with the pioneers’ own words, The Way We Ate is truly a feast for those who believe that “much depends on dinner.”

Contains letters, journals, and reminiscences showing the impact of the frontier on women's lives and the role of women in the West.

This new edition of Karen Blair�s popular anthology originally published in 1989 includes thirteen essays, eight of which are new. Together they suggest the wide spectrum of women�s experiences that make up a vital part of Northwest history.

This work chronicles the struggle for the Douglas-fir region, from the first sustained contact between native American and Euro-American cultures to 1900, when Fredrick Weyerhaeuser's purchase of some of the area completed one of the largest land deals in US history.