The official podcast companion to Mossback’s Northwest, a video series about Pacific Northwest history from Cascade PBS. Mossback features stories that were left on the cutting room floor, along with critical analysis from co-host Knute Berger. Hosted by Knute Berger and Stephen Hegg
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Still encountering racism in the 'free' states of the West, some Black communities sought the American Dream in Canada. Before the Civil War, many states in the American West were considered “free” because the institution of slavery was outlawed. That didn’t mean, however, that these places were free from racism and legalized discrimination. So when a group of Black Americans from San Francisco were invited to join what was then a British colony in Victoria, on Vancouver Island, hundreds agreed ...
P-Patches launched a modern agricultural movement in the 1970s, sprouting from a small family farm in Wedgwood. Seattle was once full of farms. But as the city developed, land-use regulation and other forces began to push farmers out. One farming family feeling the squeeze in Seattle in the 1970s helped launch a program that has had a profound impact on the city ever since. A piece of their land became the first of what is now a collection of about 90 public urban gardens, or “P-Patches.” Crossc...
The North Cascades' bear population thrived in the 19th century, but now almost none are left. Advocates are working to bring them back. The iconic grizzly bear once roamed the North Cascades. Grizzly bones have also been found as far west as Whidbey Island. Today, however, there are almost no grizzlies left in Washington state. Some government agencies have started the process of potentially reintroducing the bears to the region, given their history as a key part of the ecosystem. This idea, ho...
In 1924, four airplanes took off from what’s now Magnuson Park. Six months and more than 26,000 miles later, half the fleet made it back. The 1920s marked an era of aviation. After World War I, many powerful nations focused on the new technology and rushed to be the first to use it to circumnavigate the globe. In 1924, the U.S. military selected eight Army pilots and four specially made biplanes with open-air cockpits to make that first attempt. The pilots were called “the Magellans of the Sky” ...
The millionaire built a 'castle' on the Columbia River and later a replica of the English monument. The Stonehenge that sits atop Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England, has long inspired speculation of its purpose and imitators to its form. One of those imitators overlooks the Columbia River in Washington state where it inspires questions: Who built the replica and why? The answer to the first part of that question is Samuel Hill, a wealthy railroad man who marveled at the landscape the abutted ...
For decades, department stores competed for customers. Knute Berger recalls how Frederick & Nelson lured them in with a chocolate mint truffle. Food does more than feed us. It connects us, to each other, to traditions and to place. This is true everywhere, but especially in the Pacific Northwest, where an abundance of life creates endless options for indulgence. Salmon, apples and even chicken teriyaki all have a spot in the hearts of Northwesterners, but there is one delectable that seems t...
Earnest Darling was a regular Northwestern kid until an illness inspired him to shed his clothes and take to the woods. Fame followed. On the desk of Crosscut's resident historian Kute Berger sits a black-and-white photograph of a man with a kind of contemporary look. He is standing, bearded, in what looks like a tropical setting. And he’s wearing a mesh crop top. This is Earnest Darling and the photo, surprisingly, was taken in 1908. "He looks like someone I went to college with at the Evergree...
When a film is shot in a city, it is often a big deal. There are lots of trucks, lots of crew and lots of traffic disruption. It’s big business, and for the latter decades of the 20th century it was business that was often done in Seattle. Tugboat Anni e, the first Hollywood film shot in the Emerald City, came to town in the 1930s. But it wasn’t until the early ’60s that Seattle really became a destination for directors and actors. It started with the Elvis Presley vehicle It Happened at the Wor...
During the timber boom, opportunists turned the remains of old-growth trees into homes and postcard spectacles. The timber boom of the early 20th century reshaped both the places and the population of the Pacific Northwest. At one point, 63 percent of wage earners in Washington were drawing a paycheck from the industry that was felling the old-growth forests to produce lumber and profits. The remains of those trees – their massive, imposing stumps – served as a kind of cultural signifier for the...
Decades after the Civil War, southern sympathizers sought to rewrite history. Knute Berger explains how those efforts were received in the Northwest. When Gone With the Wind premiered in Seattle in 1940, it was an event. Moviegoers who ventured Downtown to attend a showing of the Civil War drama were met with fanfare. The street outside The 5th Avenue Theatre, where the film was playing, was decorated as if for a Fourth of July parade, with one notable exception: the presence of Confederate flag...
Long before an industry was built around capturing orcas, a tragic encounter between a wayward whale and humanity foretold decades of exploitation. There are few animals that capture the imagination of human beings the way that orcas have. For decades people have paid money to see them, scientists have studied them intently and, in the Seattle area, concerned news consumers have tracked their every move. At the start of the 1930s, though, there wasn’t yet a market for whale watching. Enter Ethel...
The podcast delves into the profound impact of the New Deal on the Pacific Northwest, examining how federal programs mobilized during the Great Depression brought modernization, cheap power, and employment to a hard-hit resource economy. It highlights monumental projects like the Grand Coulee Dam, the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps, and even the cultural contributions of artists like Woody Guthrie. The discussion also covers the challenges, environmental consequences, and the enduring political legacy of this transformative era.
Before there was Ernestine Anderson, Ray Charles and Quincy Jones, there was Frank Waldron. The unfortunate irony of Seattle’s storied jazz scene of the early 20th century is that there are many stories but not much jazz to account for it. While recording technology existed at the time, it wasn’t being used to capture much of the music being created in those early years of the Jackson Street music scene. The music has instead spread its influence through compositions and the living tradition of ...
The Canadian artist created landscapes unlike her contemporaries’, intuiting the web of life beneath the canopy and putting it on canvas. As a painter in early 20th-century British Columbia, Emily Carr approached her subject matter through a colonial lens and expressed what she saw with a modernist style developed in the studios of London and Paris. She earned renown for her early depictions of Indigenous cultures, work that would later be criticized as appropriative. It was later in her career,...
He was invited to the city to talk about his storied past, but the Nez Perce chief had his eye on the future of his people. When Chief Joseph arrived in Seattle in 1903, he had a message to deliver and a public interested in hearing it. He had become a kind of celebrity, though the nature of his renown was complicated. A leader of the Wallowa band of the Nez Perce Tribe, Joseph had joined his people as they were pushed out of their ancestral home in northeast Oregon by the U.S. Army. And he had ...
A border conflict between the U.S. and Britain, combined with the ambitions of a future Confederate general, almost turned the Salish Sea into a war zone. The so-called Pig War of 1859 may have been initiated by the killing of a boar, but other forces were at play that nearly elevated a neighborly conflict into an international conflagration. The conflict took place on San Juan Island, a disputed territory that was home to both American and British colonists. And on the American side was a futur...
There was money to be had during the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s. And the infamous lawman knew how to get it. Wyatt Earp was a man often on the move. In the two decades after his and Doc Holliday’s storied shootout at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, he spent time in San Francisco, Utah and Alaska, shading his reputation with turns as a sportsman, gambler and entrepreneur. The gold rushes of the late 19th century charted the course for Earp and his common-law wife, Josephine, as the...
This episode delves into the life of Paul Robeson, an extraordinary actor, athlete, and singer whose global career was overshadowed by his political activism. His criticism of U.S. race relations and foreign policy during the Cold War led to the seizure of his passport, severely impacting his livelihood. The podcast explores how this government suppression prompted Robeson to stage influential concerts at the U.S.-Canada Peace Arch, highlighting themes of free speech and America's unfulfilled promises, which still resonate today.
The famed Arctic explorer thrived when times were tough, and they were often tough. In the years that followed he would become the first person to successfully reach the South Pole and, later, would travel to the North Pole. Before that latter trip, Amundsen returned to Seattle and set up camp for six months, updating his gear and shoring up his finances. Crosscut's resident historian Knute Berger told the story of Amundsen's time in Seattle in a recent episode of his Mossback's Northwest video ...
The Seattle landmark is best known for its connection to the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II — but it has more stories to tell. The Panama Hotel in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District is best known for the role it played during the expulsion and incarceration of Japanese Americans after President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. That order resulted in more than 120,000 men, women and children on the West Coast being forcibly removed from their homes, taking w...
Newly discovered files shed light on the creation of the Seattle icon and the fight over who deserves the credit for its distinctive look. Hear all about it in this special preview of the new Crosscut podcast, Crosscut Reports . When the Space Needle rose quickly on the Seattle city skyline, the response was varied. Some loved it, some hated it. Some likened it to a flower blossoming, others said it resembled a mushroom cloud. The Cold War was on everyone’s mind. So was the future. The Needle wa...
Enjoy this short excerpt of Crosscut's newest podcast title, which features host Brooklyn Jamerson-Flowers touring the places that have fostered Seattle’s Black artists. Every episode of the Black Arts Legacies podcast explores the history and ongoing impact of an art spaces in Seattle, the stories of each built around the voices of the artists who claim these places as critical to their development and experts who understand their deep history. The podcast is part of Black Arts Legacies , a maj...
In pop culture, the relocation of 'marriageable' women to places like Seattle was played as a humorous, feel-good story. It wasn’t. In the midst of the Civil War, a man named Asa Mercer headed East to seek out women to move to the small frontier town of Seattle. It’s a familiar story, one that served as inspiration for a television show called Here Come the Brides and the musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers . Those shows played the scheme for good-hearted laughs, but the reality was no laugh...
Horace Cayton Sr. headed west in the late 19th century and found success and opportunity in Seattle. Then an ugly new era changed the city and his family's fortunes. When Cayton moved out of the Jim Crow South in the late 19th century, it appeared that the young man had found a new kind of freedom and opportunity in Seattle. A member of the city's then-small African American population, Cayton started a widely read publication, The Seattle Republican, and with his wife, Suzie Sumner Revels, foun...
From Lewis and Clark’s trusted companion to a lifesaving sled dog, these canines have been honored with statues, taxidermy and legend. It is a well-documented fact that, in Seattle at least, dogs outnumber children. And while that ratio may even out as you look further afield, its hard to deny that dogs have a major influence over life in the Pacific Northwest. That has long been the case and the roles that those dogs have played in the story of the region have been varied and include the woolly...
Brother to Edward, Asahel Curtis had his own approach to capturing the culture of the region. The way we see the modern history of the Pacific Northwest would have been very different if a certain family of homesteaders hadn't settled in Kitsap County in the late nineteenth century. Out of that family of farmers would come, not one, but two prolific photographers whose work would help define the region for generations to come. Edward Curtis is the more famous of the two brothers, his stylized po...
No one really knows who made the first of these delicacies, but some sleuthing reveals an origin spurred by the gold rush and railroads. Crab has been a part of the culture of what we now call the Pacific Northwest for a very long time. But how the people of this region eat that crab has changed over the years and those changes can tell a lot. Take Crab Louis, for instance. As a dish it is fairly simple: some crab, some vegetables, some red sauce. Yet the story of Crab Louis is one of western co...
The legendary lumberjack has been central to American identity. But who does he really represent? Over the course of the past two centuries, tall tales of Paul Bunyan have stretched across North America, from the frigid woods of the East Coast all the way to the Pacific. With his ax and his ox Babe, the legendary lumberjack is said to have single-handedly shaped the continent. That was all fiction, of course. Much of the landscape that Bunyan is credited with creating was here long before any wh...
Headlines about sea creatures were once a regular occurrence around the Salish Sea. We take a deep dive into local lore. When it comes to cryptids, there is one creature that puts the Pacific Northwest on the map: Sasquatch. But Bigfoot hasn’t always had a monopoly on mysterious sightings in the area. Sea monsters long inspired horror and fascination around the Salish Sea and on the Pacific Coast. Large creatures in the waters of the Northwest are depicted in Indigenous artworks from precolonial...
A closer examination — with more theories — of the case of the world’s most famous mile-high bandit. On the afternoon of Nov. 24, 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper boarded a Seattle-bound 727 in Portland, with plans to pull off what would become a historic heist. Later that night, the man leapt from the plane with $200,000 in hand and, presumably, a parachute on his back. He was never heard from again. Yet the story of that high-flying crime has been told innumerable times, turning the man ...
