Skid Road tells the story of Seattle "from the bottom up," offering an informal and engaging portrait of the Emerald City's first century, as seen through the lives of some of its most colorful citizens. With his trademark combination of deep local knowledge, precision, and wit, Murray Morgan traces the city's history from its earliest days as a hacked-from-the-wilderness timber town, touching on local tribes, settlers, the lumber and railroad industries, the great fire of 1889, the Alaska gold rush, flourishing dens of vice, general strikes, the 1962 World's Fair, and the stuttering growth of the 1970s and '80s. Through it all, Morgan shows us that Seattle's one constant is change and that its penchant for reinvention has always been fueled by creative, if sometimes unorthodox, residents. With a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic Mary Ann Gwinn, this redesigned edition of Murray Morgan's classic work is a must for those interested in how Seattle got to where it is today.

Skid Road: An Informal Portrait of Seattle

History

Morgan, Murray

Americas

University of Washington Press

With the same ability to make personalities and events come alive that characterizes his classic Skid Road, Murray Morgan here tells the colorful story of Tacoma, "the City of Destiny," and southern Puget Sound, where many major events of Washington's history took place. Drawing upon original journals and reports, Morgan builds Puget's Sound around individuals, interweaving portraits of well-known historical figures with those who are more obscure but have a special significance: a colorful parade of saloonkeepers, politicians, union organizers, schemers, and swindlers. Morgan begins his account with the landing of Captain Vancouver in Puget Sound in 1792 and ends with the founding of Fort Lewis in 1916, the year the author was born. Between are the arrival of the transcontinental railroad, the boom-and-bust of lumber mills, the anti-Chinese riots of 1885, and more unique Northwest history that will intrigue both new arrivals and longtime residents. With a new introduction by historian and historic preservationist Michael Sean Sullivan, this redesigned edition of Puget's Sound brings new life to Morgan's landmark history of the South Sound and the early days of Tacoma.

Puget's Sound: A Narrative of Early Tacoma and the Southern Sound

Murray Morgan's classic history of the Olympic Peninsula, originally published in 1955, evokes a remote American wilderness "as large as the state of Massachusetts, more rugged than the Rockies, its lowlands blanketed by a cool jungle of fir and pine and cedar, its peaks bearing hundreds of miles of living ice that gave rise to swift rivers alive with giant salmon." Drawing on historical research and personal tales collected from docks, forest trails, and waterways, Morgan recounts vivid adventures of the area's settlers―loggers, hunters, prospectors, homesteaders, utopianists, murderers, profit-seekers, conservationists, Wobblies, and bureaucrats―alongside stories of coastal first peoples and striking descriptions of the peninsula's wildlife and land. Freshly redesigned and with a new introduction by poet and environmentalist Tim McNulty, this humor-filled saga and landmark love story of one of the most formidably beautiful regions of the Pacific Northwest will inform and engage a new generation of readers.

The Last Wilderness

When Eric A. Hegg rushed north to Alaska in 1897, he as a journeyman photographer, largely self-trained. He forced a sled load of photographic equipment across the coastal mountains in the dead of winter. He hiked out to the claims on Bonanza and Eldorado, and he poked his camera into the banks and bars and bordellos in Dawson. He rode a paddle-wheel steamer down the Yukon to the Bering and was on the dark sands of the beach at Home when the prospectors swirled gravel in their pans and worked their mechanical rockers. Most important, he was there, high on the Chilkoot Pass in the winter of 1897-98, as the dark-clad men climbed antlike up the frozen steps of The Scales under the burden of a year's supplies.
"Hegg, like Mathew Brady, was a pictorial documentor rather than a camera artist, and he took many of these pictures--of miners at work, miners drunk, miners' womenfolk, miners dead in gunfights, miners in bawdy houses, miners on the trek--to sell to the people in them. What we have, then, is a superbly illustrated and superbly deadpan chronical of a not always attractive but certainly interesting episode in human history." --The New Yorker
"Better than any other record, reflects the folly and the glory of the stampede to the Klondike." --New York Times Book Review

One Man?s Gold Rush: A Klondike Album

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

First published in 1955, this book tells the lively and entertaining story of the Olympic Peninsula, "the fist of land thrust north between Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean, a wilderness area of six thousand square miles, as large as the state of Massachusetts, more rugged than the Rockies, its lowlands blanketed by a cool jungle of fir and pine and cedar, its peaks bearing hundreds of miles of living ice that gave rise to swift rivers alive with giant salmon; the first land in the Pacific Northwest to be reported by explorers, the last to be mapped--the last wilderness." Murray Morgan has recorded the epic adventures of the pioneers of this remote region in this rousing and humor-filled saga, one that should capture the imagination of Americans everywhere.

With the same ability to make personalities and events come alive that characterizes his classic Skid Road, Murray Morgan here tells the colorful story of southern Puget Sound, where major events of Washington's history took place, and of Tacoma, the area's principal city. Drawing upon the original journals and reports, Morgan tells his story largely in terms of individuals, interweaving portraits of well-known historical figures with those who are more obscure but who have a special significance.Journalist and historian Murray Morgan (1916-2000) was the author of more than twenty books, including Skid Road: An Informal Portrait of Seattle and The Last Wilderness. He worked for Time magazine, the New York Herald Tribune, and CBS News before returning to Washington where he taught at Tacoma Community College and for fifteen years hosted the early morning radio show "Our Town, Our World."

Univ of Washington Pr

With the same ability to make personalities and events come alive that characterizes his classic Skid Road, Murray Morgan here tells the colorful story of southern Puget Sound, where major events of Washington's history took place, and of Tacoma, the area's principal city. Drawing upon the original journals and reports, Morgan tells his story largely in terms of individuals, interweaving portraits of well-known historical figures with those who are more obscure but who have a special significance.
Journalist and historian Murray Morgan (1916-2000) was the author of more than twenty books, including Skid Road: An Informal Portrait of Seattle and The Last Wilderness. He worked for Time magazine, the New York Herald Tribune, and CBS News before returning to Washington where he taught at Tacoma Community College and for fifteen years hosted the early morning radio show "Our Town, Our World."

Puget's Sound (Columbia Northwest Classics)

Lang, William L.

Skid Road

Travel

United States

Ballantine Books

Literature & Fiction

VIKING

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Morgan, Murray. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Morgan, Murray

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Morgan, Murray. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Skid Road: An Informal Portrait of Seattle

Puget's Sound: A Narrative of Early Tacoma and the Southern Sound

Puget's Sound: A Narrative of Early Tacoma and the Southern Sound

The Last Wilderness

One Man?s Gold Rush: A Klondike Album

The Last Wilderness

Puget's Sound: A Narrative of Early Tacoma and the Southern Sound

Puget's Sound (Columbia Northwest Classics)

Skid Road

Skid Road: An Informal Portrait of Seattle