eBook Stepping Westward: The Long Search for Home in the Pacific Northwest download

This road trip, journey of initiation and discovery is a Joan Didion style account. A very interesting means of objectifying subjective experience— important in a networking environment prone to making us statistical.

Tisdale definitely has a way with words, and the novelist's touch, at times blinking back and forth between word choices like a caution light at a semi-busy intersection. But it's about 75% cutesy, and at about 25% truth, the latter sacrificed in shoddy or missing research for the ultimate end of lancing her fierce boil of liberal guilt. And here is where the term I'm calling "latte history" comes in: applying to those writers whose familiarity with their subject is mostly found in their having read a book or two, doubtlessly while sipping some chai or coffee drink, far from the mess and blood and ambiguity of real history. A couple of examples.

Some of her ignorance is mostly silly and, I suppose, trivial. She tries to create a joke about the (apparently) dreary western Oregon winters by comparing them to New York weather (p. 41). Anyone who has lived in both places (as I have) would LOVE the "dreariness" of the rain and mist, at the expense of long winters that seem to go on forever. Explorers and missionaries from NY could not believe their good fortune when they settled in the Willamette Valley, thinking the weather of their new home salubrious in the extreme! Their diaries and letters are full of their hearty praises for the climate of their new home. This continues today, of course, with vast numbers of people apparently having little trouble adjusting to the western Oregon (and Washington) winters, and leaving the humid and frigid rust belt in droves.

She also apparently is ignorant of the most basic heights of mountains, "being tempted" (she says on p. 68) to remind her readers that "Mt. Shasta (14,000+ feet) is four times higher than the highest point in New York (Mt Marcy at 5300+ feet)." She also quotes the major eruption of Mt. St. Helens as occurring in 1989 instead of when it actually occurred, 1980 (p. 172). Hmmmm. Did ANYONE edit this book?

But her playing fast and loose with the facts extends beyond the trivial to more serious errors, ones motivated by her desire to castigate pioneers and glorify native peoples. In her discussion of the Rogue Indian War (ca. 1855) in which tragedies and depredations occurred on both sides, she has the captive Rogues walking "hundreds of miles" to the "Grande Ronde Indian Reservation in eastern Oregon" (p. 94). The problem is that that reservation was/is in WESTERN Oregon, an error motivated by internal philosophy, and apparently by the wish to create her own "Trail of Tears."

She also accepts at face value whatever the Oregon poet Joaquin Miller says, despite acknowledging that he was "master of the half-truth" (p. 93). And, if depending on poor sources is apparently OK when it supports your cause, quoting none at all is not much of a stretch either! On page 91, Tisdale states a claim that is certainly unusual enough to need some source of documentation: "Merry miners are said to have set (mountain) slopes ablaze for recreation." But there is no source cited at all for this quote. If her point was only that drunks do stupid and outlandish things, such hardly is noteworthy, living as we are in an era in which booze is the tragic fuel for murders, rapes, robbery, and mayhem. But her quote is smack in the middle of a long section whose goal is to portray miners as horrific, evil men, exemplars of greed. As such, then, she needs to quote some source.

Finally--but sadly not surprisingly--she completely swallows the long-discredited notion that Chief Sealth made the speech accredited to him (p. 130), the one in which Natives will "haunt" the whites for their destruction of the land, and the one that reads more like an environmental activist speech from the 70s (for that it is what it was). She does this despite the fact that Sealth's speech mentions the destruction of the buffalo (despite the fact that that tragedy had not taken place yet, and would likely not be on the radar screen for a Native from Puget Sound!). Furtwangler's "Answering Chief Seattle" completely demolishes the idea that Sealth said anything like that, and although published after Tisdale's book by six years, he used information widely and easily available if anyone had cared to look. Tisdale apparently did not.

The prototypical example of Tisdale's style, however, is how she treats the existence of the mythical creature "sasquatch" (pp. 175ff). She approaches it with childlike wonder, wanting the now-debunked Roger Patterson film of a purported sasquatch to be true, and using the primal innocence of the creature to paint the picture of the northwest that she imagines to be true, where miners "shoot" at the creature and one is reported sad in a clearcut (p. 178), obviously at the loss of its companions, the trees! Hers is a northwest that never existed, a fairy land where nothing is ever disturbed, no animal dies, no fern trampled. Where Gortex-clad yuppies can all join hands as they tread softly on twigs that never break. In other words, Tisdale is telling a bedtime story of a land that likely never existed and never will--it is a myth crafted of loss and hopes, but not truth.

Perhaps Tisdale herself recognizes that she has little or nothing in common with these faraway people, who lived in another era and in other places. She admits that her belief that Teddy Roosevelt's holding to his dual truths of "loving the kill" and "virgin wilderness" was "incomprehensible" to her. And so it is. And maybe that is the core problem: Tisdale's account lacks a basic understanding of her topic, being satisfied all too often with trivial stereotypes crafted from afar. Tisdale, like other urbanites living in the liberal cities of the western Pacific Northwest, wastes little time in castigating pioneers who worried more about survival than drafting environmental impact statements; smallpox more than insisting on soy instead of milk in their lattes. These moderns would like to travel safely back to 1491, but of course with all the conveniences that the urban destruction of the environment has provided.

This book is less about the PNW of the 19th-century than it is about the cultural divide that separates the modern, urban sophisticate from her or his visits to the mythical zoos of the past, zoos of their own creation. The historic Pacific Northwest of this book is a myth, a created straw man of convenience, whimsy, and childish hopes. For as many of the postmodern "historians" keep demonstrating, there is no easier target than a dead man.