“The Olympic Peninsula is more than just big trees and scenic coastlines. Layered on this rich landscape are unique animals and plants, extraordinary geology, histories of Native Americans that go back thousands of years, exploits of famed European explorers, and the hard work of the early pioneers. Roadside Guide to the Olympic Peninsula is your complete guidebook as it weaves all this together while escorting you around the Peninsula.”

“Smitty Parratt’s long out-of-print book, Gods & Goblins, has for years been the bible of Olympic National Park culture and history. Now back in print, this new edition features dozens of recently unearthed stories and photographs in addition to Smitty’s original materal. The 700 entries of this book tell the stories of Native Americans, mountain men, early explorers, settlers and captialists who gave names to the geography of the Olympic National Park.”

“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.

“Mastodons roamed the plains of Sequim and Dungeness in the years following the recession of the Cordilleran ice sheets. Millennia later, the villages of S’Klallam were home to those who saw settlers disembarking on the periphery of coastal wilderness. Ancient stands of spruce, cedar, and fir fell in the 1800s, clearing the land for agriculture. By the 1900s, the region exported wheat, potatoes, hay, and oats and became prime dairy land. This compilation of historic photographs illustrates the area’s history from the 1800s to 1930 and is complimented by information from archival documents sequestered in historical collections throughout the Puget Sound and at the Museum and Arts Archive in Sequim.”

“A magnificent evocation of the Pacific Northwest, Winter Brothers fuses excerpts from the unpublished diaries of James Gilchrist Swan, an early settler of the region who was drawn from Boston in the 1850s, with Ivan Doig’s own journal entries as travels in Swan’s footsteps one winter along the once-wild coastline of Puget Sound. What emerges is a remarkable interaction of two minds, a dialogue across time that links the present with the reality of the American frontier.”