Mossback

Newly discovered files shed light on the creation of the Seattle icon and the fight over who deserves the credit for its distinctive look. Hear all about it in this special preview of the new Crosscut podcast, Crosscut Reports . When the Space Needle rose quickly on the Seattle city skyline, the response was varied. Some loved it, some hated it. Some likened it to a flower blossoming, others said...

Enjoy this short excerpt of Crosscut's newest podcast title, which features host Brooklyn Jamerson-Flowers touring the places that have fostered Seattle’s Black artists. Every episode of the Black Arts Legacies podcast explores the history and ongoing impact of an art spaces in Seattle, the stories of each built around the voices of the artists who claim these places as critical to their developme...

In pop culture, the relocation of 'marriageable' women to places like Seattle was played as a humorous, feel-good story. It wasn’t. In the midst of the Civil War, a man named Asa Mercer headed East to seek out women to move to the small frontier town of Seattle. It’s a familiar story, one that served as inspiration for a television show called Here Come the Brides and the musical Seven Brides for...

Horace Cayton Sr. headed west in the late 19th century and found success and opportunity in Seattle. Then an ugly new era changed the city and his family's fortunes. When Cayton moved out of the Jim Crow South in the late 19th century, it appeared that the young man had found a new kind of freedom and opportunity in Seattle. A member of the city's then-small African American population, Cayton sta...

From Lewis and Clark’s trusted companion to a lifesaving sled dog, these canines have been honored with statues, taxidermy and legend. It is a well-documented fact that, in Seattle at least, dogs outnumber children. And while that ratio may even out as you look further afield, its hard to deny that dogs have a major influence over life in the Pacific Northwest.  That has long been the case and the...

Brother to Edward, Asahel Curtis had his own approach to capturing the culture of the region. The way we see the modern history of the Pacific Northwest would have been very different if a certain family of homesteaders hadn't settled in Kitsap County in the late nineteenth century.  Out of that family of farmers would come, not one, but two prolific photographers whose work would help define the...

No one really knows who made the first of these delicacies, but some sleuthing reveals an origin spurred by the gold rush and railroads. Crab has been a part of the culture of what we now call the Pacific Northwest for a very long time. But how the people of this region eat that crab has changed over the years and those changes can tell a lot.  Take Crab Louis, for instance. As a dish it is fairly...

The legendary lumberjack has been central to American identity. But who does he really represent? Over the course of the past two centuries, tall tales of Paul Bunyan have stretched across North America, from the frigid woods of the East Coast all the way to the Pacific. With his ax and his ox Babe, the legendary lumberjack is said to have single-handedly shaped the continent.  That was all fictio...

Headlines about sea creatures were once a regular occurrence around the Salish Sea. We take a deep dive into local lore. When it comes to cryptids, there is one creature that puts the Pacific Northwest on the map: Sasquatch. But Bigfoot hasn’t always had a monopoly on mysterious sightings in the area. Sea monsters long inspired horror and fascination around the Salish Sea and on the Pacific Coast....

A closer examination — with more theories — of the case of the world’s most famous mile-high bandit. On the afternoon of Nov. 24, 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper boarded a Seattle-bound 727 in Portland, with plans to pull off what would become a historic heist. Later that night, the man leapt from the plane with $200,000 in hand and, presumably, a parachute on his back. He was never heard f...

Mossback is the companion podcast to the popular Mossback’s Northwest video series that airs on KCTS 9. The Mossback podcast digs deeper into the topics that fans want to know more about from the current season of Mossback’s Northwest. Hosted by Sara Bernard, each episode of this series will feature an interview with Mossback, Knute Berger, about one episode of the video series. The podcasts will...