Read Online The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest by Timothy Egan - Free Book Online Page A

mountains, especially ones with such an evil reputation, could be … transcendent … was visionary. During the very summer that Winthrop felt calmed by the Olympics, a group of fellow New Englanders, having exhausted the timber of the state of Maine, were making plans to begin leveling the Olympic rain forest. Possibly Winthrop, the rebel who had to lug around five generations of Puritan baggage, was influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poet and philosopher who thought reality was best experienced through a soul in tune with the rhythms of the earth. In the description of his Pacific Northwest journey, a few pages after crowing about the Olympics, Winthrop skewers the old view while accurately predicting his own place in history: “Poet comeslong after pioneer. Mountains have been waiting, even in ancient worlds, for cycles, while mankind looked upon them as high, cold, dreary, crushing, as resorts for demons and homes of desolating storms.” Instead, he says, mountains should be “our noblest friends, our most exalting and inspiring comrades, our grandest emblems of divine power and divine peace.”
    As it turned out, a handful of poets came to the Olympics before pioneers. The great naturalist John Muir, tromping through the ancient forests here in 1889, found a scattering of Winthrop-type characters a full generation after the Yankee’s prophecy. Muir wrote: “In these Washington wilds, living alone, all sorts of men may perchance be found—poets, philosophers, even full-blown transcendentalists, though you may go far to find them.”
    What came of these poets is not recorded. But one year after Muir’s visit, the prose was considerably less flattering when the Seattle Press organized an expedition of well-armed explorers to penetrate the interior of the Olympics. This was the so-called Press Expedition, put together as a newspaper promotional stunt to satisfy the forty thousand citizens of Seattle who in 1890 still had no idea what lurked behind those blue and green walls forty miles across the Sound. The first group photo shows a mean-faced crew clutching rifles, with bullet belts slung over their shoulders. They look like mercenaries on leave from the barbershop quartet. Loaded down with tons of food, boxes of whiskey, carpenter’s tools and enough ammunition to wrest Vancouver Island from the British, the Press Expedition took four weeks just to leave the outskirts of civilization on the northern peninsula. By then, “our supply of whiskey was well-nigh exhausted,” one member told the paper in a dispatch.
    The ultimate boys camp-out quickly soured. Two months into the trip, they had completed construction of a flat-bottomed barge, which moved upstream at a slug’s pace and had to be portaged most of the way because the rapids of the Elwha River were too shallow. Bereft of whiskey, the group leader, James Christie, gave some insight into the ordeal in midwinter. “An extraordinary amount of rain—water falling in sheets,” he wrote. “There has scarcely been a single hour for the last week without a shower bath that went straight to the skin. Oil clothing seems to be of no use and we have discarded it as useless.” In a bid for wider readership, they named dozens of mountains after dozens of newspaper editors, most of whom had never been west of their city rooms. George Childs, owner of the Philadelphia Ledger , was given a mountain; Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World was offered Mount Pulitzer; a competitor, James GordonBennett of the New York Herald , had his Mount Bennett, and another Manhattan rival, George F. Jones of the New York Times , could sleep easier knowing he had an Olympic peak to call his own; Mount Hearst was named for William Randolph Hearst of the San Francisco Examiner; and of course a city editor at the Seattle Press , a gentleman by the name of John G. Egan (no relation), was immortalized with Mount Egan. On my map today, I cannot find a single one of their names.
    In the