The Pacific raincoast : environment and culture in an American Eden, 1778-1900

Summary: The Pacific Northwest has always evoked images of lush forested landscapes and travelogue vistas. More recently, such images have been marred by much-publicized controversies pitting spotted owls and salmon against logging interests and power companies. But, as Robert Bunting shows, such conflicts are only the most recent indications of the competition for dominion in the Douglas-fir region running from southern Canada to northern California. Bunting chronicles this struggle from the first sustained contact between Native American and Euroamerican cultures to 1900, when Frederick Weyerhaeuser's purchase of 900,000 acres of Washington forest completed one of the largest land deals in U.S. history. He depicts an evolving Eden that was never as environmentally pristine nor as viciously exploited as some have suggested, but which reflected the complex relations created by competing cultures amid the illusion of inexhaustible abundance.