Ancient Places: People and Landscape in the Emerging Northwest - by Jack Nisbet

Ancient Places: People and Landscape in the Emerging Northwest
by Jack Nisbet
Published by Sasquatch Books
ISBN: 978-1-57061-980-9
How the Land Shapes the People, and the People Shape the Land
"Jack Nisbet peels back the landscapes of the Northwest to uncover layers of meaning in unexpected places. He encourages us to look with a new, but also eons-old, light on mountains and rivers, traditional cultures and more recent settlers. Nisbet shows again that he is a leading chronicler of the region." - Peter Stark, author of Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire
Ancient Places is an assemblage of nonfiction stories about the interplay between people and the landscape where they happen to live. Drawing on a range of fresh personal research, both oral and written, author Jack Nisbet (Sources of the River, The Collector) engages some of the iconic images in Northwest history: from fossil riches to Ice Age floods, from the Willamette Meteorite to the 1872 Earthquake, from up-and-down mining cycles to steady rounds of tribal food gathering.
Although the scale of time and space in some of the pieces is immense, individual characters still manage to leave their marks; even though the force of modern civilization sometimes seems overwhelming, small places and their key components persevere.
"Master historian Nisbet has communed with Indians, astronauts, miners, and scientists to reveal a wonderfully personal, engaging, and authoritative picture of the cultural and natural history of the Inland Northwest. Ancient Places takes the reader from the earliest geological events that defined the region to the human and environmental forces at work today." - John Marzluff, author of Welcome to Subirdia and Gifts of the Crow