Mossback

Back-to-back disasters in Washington and B.C. killed more than 150 people in 1910. Knute Berger digs into the traumatic circumstances and their fallout. In the stormy winter of 1910, an avalanche struck two stalled trains in Wellington, a railroad outpost in Washington’s Central Cascades. Three days later, another one blanketed dozens of rail workers in the Canadian Selkirks.  Both events remain t...

Crater Lake wasn’t always a lake. Knute Berger tells the story of when a blast 50 times the size of Mt St. Helens' blanketed the PNW in ash. Crater Lake National Park in southern Oregon is known for its crown jewel: a brilliantly blue and very deep alpine lake. But some 8,000 years ago, this lake was a mountain.  Then the mountain erupted, blowing its top and layering ash so far afield that it imp...

Asahel Curtis shot thousands of images in the early 20th century. Knute Berger talks about the effort to share them with the public for the first time. Asahel Curtis, the renowned Pacific Northwest photographer, was amazingly prolific. He documented regional life for 50 years, from the 1890s to the 1940s. Crosscut’s resident historian Knute Berger explored Curtis’ work and legacy in Season 5 of th...

Catherine Montgomery spearheaded a movement to preserve old growth in Washington forests. Knute Berger shares her story. In the early 1900s in Washington, women couldn’t yet vote, but many formed powerful civic groups to advocate for everything from prison reform to forest preservation.   One woman stands out: the mountaineer, teacher, activist and suffragist Catherine Montgomery. Her advocacy hel...

In 1915, Germany wanted to keep the United States from joining World War I. Knute Berger explains how the fight came to the Northwest. In the years leading up to World War I, Germany and its sympathizers tried to prevent the United States from entering the conflict. An intricate network of spies and saboteurs attempted to sway public opinion as well as interrupt shipments of war materiel at U.S. p...

Still encountering racism in the 'free' states of the West, some Black communities sought the American Dream in Canada. Before the Civil War, many states in the American West were considered “free” because the institution of slavery was outlawed. That didn’t mean, however, that these places were free from racism and legalized discrimination. So when a group of Black Americans from San Francisco we...

P-Patches launched a modern agricultural movement in the 1970s, sprouting from a small family farm in Wedgwood. Seattle was once full of farms. But as the city developed, land-use regulation and other forces began to push farmers out.  One farming family feeling the squeeze in Seattle in the 1970s helped launch a program that has had a profound impact on the city ever since. A piece of their land...

The North Cascades' bear population thrived in the 19th century, but now almost none are left. Advocates are working to bring them back. The iconic grizzly bear once roamed the North Cascades. Grizzly bones have also been found as far west as Whidbey Island. Today, however, there are almost no grizzlies left in Washington state.  Some government agencies have started the process of potentially rei...

In 1924, four airplanes took off from what’s now Magnuson Park. Six months and more than 26,000 miles later, half the fleet made it back. The 1920s marked an era of aviation. After World War I, many powerful nations focused on the new technology and rushed to be the first to use it to circumnavigate the globe. In 1924, the U.S. military selected eight Army pilots and four specially made biplanes w...

The millionaire built a 'castle' on the Columbia River and later a replica of the English monument. The Stonehenge that sits atop Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England, has long inspired speculation of its purpose and imitators to its form. One of those imitators overlooks the Columbia River in Washington state where it inspires questions: Who built the replica and why? The answer to the first par...

For decades, department stores competed for customers. Knute Berger recalls how Frederick & Nelson lured them in with a chocolate mint truffle. Food does more than feed us. It connects us, to each other, to traditions and to place. This is true everywhere, but especially in the Pacific Northwest, where an abundance of life creates endless options for indulgence.  Salmon, apples and even chicke...

Earnest Darling was a regular Northwestern kid until an illness inspired him to shed his clothes and take to the woods. Fame followed. On the desk of Crosscut's resident historian Kute Berger sits a black-and-white photograph of a man with a kind of contemporary look. He is standing, bearded, in what looks like a tropical setting. And he’s wearing a mesh crop top.  This is Earnest Darling and the...

When a film is shot in a city, it is often a big deal. There are lots of trucks, lots of crew and lots of traffic disruption. It’s big business, and for the latter decades of the 20th century it was business that was often done in Seattle. Tugboat Anni e, the first Hollywood film shot in the Emerald City, came to town in the 1930s. But it wasn’t until the early ’60s that Seattle really became a de...

During the timber boom, opportunists turned the remains of old-growth trees into homes and postcard spectacles. The timber boom of the early 20th century reshaped both the places and the population of the Pacific Northwest. At one point, 63 percent of wage earners in Washington were drawing a paycheck from the industry that was felling the old-growth forests to produce lumber and profits. The rema...

Decades after the Civil War, southern sympathizers sought to rewrite history. Knute Berger explains how those efforts were received in the Northwest. When Gone With the Wind premiered in Seattle in 1940, it was an event. Moviegoers who ventured Downtown to attend a showing of the Civil War drama were met with fanfare. The street outside The 5th Avenue Theatre, where the film was playing, was decor...

Long before an industry was built around capturing orcas, a tragic encounter between a wayward whale and humanity foretold decades of exploitation. There are few animals that capture the imagination of human beings the way that orcas have. For decades people have paid money to see them, scientists have studied them intently and, in the Seattle area, concerned news consumers have tracked their ever...

From cheap power to rugged hiking trails, Franklin D. Roosevelt's government transformed the region. When President Roosevelt launched the New Deal in 1933, he set off a decade-long mobilization that would help move America out of the Great Depression. It was a massive program that not only provided jobs, but also modernized infrastructure throughout the country. In the Pacific Northwest, where th...

Before there was Ernestine Anderson, Ray Charles and Quincy Jones, there was Frank Waldron. The unfortunate irony of Seattle’s storied jazz scene of the early 20th century is that there are many stories but not much jazz to account for it. While recording technology existed at the time, it wasn’t being used to capture much of the music being created in those early years of the Jackson Street music...

The Canadian artist created landscapes unlike her contemporaries’, intuiting the web of life beneath the canopy and putting it on canvas. As a painter in early 20th-century British Columbia, Emily Carr approached her subject matter through a colonial lens and expressed what she saw with a modernist style developed in the studios of London and Paris. She earned renown for her early depictions of In...

He was invited to the city to talk about his storied past, but the Nez Perce chief had his eye on the future of his people. When Chief Joseph arrived in Seattle in 1903, he had a message to deliver and a public interested in hearing it. He had become a kind of celebrity, though the nature of his renown was complicated. A leader of the Wallowa band of the Nez Perce Tribe, Joseph had joined his peop...

A border conflict between the U.S. and Britain, combined with the ambitions of a future Confederate general, almost turned the Salish Sea into a war zone. The so-called Pig War of 1859 may have been initiated by the killing of a boar, but other forces were at play that nearly elevated a neighborly conflict into an international conflagration.  The conflict took place on San Juan Island, a disputed...

There was money to be had during the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s. And the infamous lawman knew how to get it. Wyatt Earp was a man often on the move. In the two decades after his and Doc Holliday’s storied shootout at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, he spent time in San Francisco, Utah and Alaska, shading his reputation with turns as a sportsman, gambler and entrepreneur.  The gold r...

The accomplished actor, athlete and singer was an outspoken leftist, which made him a target in mid-1900s America. The reasons Paul Robeson was a beloved figure in the middle of the 20th century are many. He was a professional athlete, an accomplished actor and a sought-after singer. Yet for some in American government, his role as an outspoken activist defined him.   Robeson's criticism of his co...

The famed Arctic explorer thrived when times were tough, and they were often tough. In the years that followed he would become the first person to successfully reach the South Pole and, later, would travel to the North Pole. Before that latter trip, Amundsen returned to Seattle and set up camp for six months, updating his gear and shoring up his finances.  Crosscut's resident historian Knute Berge...

The Seattle landmark is best known for its connection to the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II — but it has more stories to tell. The Panama Hotel in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District is best known for the role it played during the expulsion and incarceration of Japanese Americans after President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066.  That order resulted in more tha...