In 1849 James Swan turned his back on his wife and two children, a prosperous ship-fitting business, and the polite and predictable world of commerce in Boston and fled to the newly opened gold fields in California. Soon sick of the bonanza society, he emigrated to a shallow harbor called Shoalwater Bay (now Willapa Bay) north of the Columbia River in Washington Territory.

Swan eagerly became a part of the frontier community, enjoying the company of both the white settlers and friendly Indians in the area. First published in 1857, his classic account of the western frontier remains...

"The Pacific Northwest's classic confrontation between militants demanding ambiguous change and an establishment intransigently defending the status quo occurred on Sunday, November 5, 1916. To this day no one knows who shot first, nor even how many died, but thanks to Mill Town, we have at last a charting of the forces, economic and personal, that led to the tragedy."--Murray Morgan

On the event of its publication in 1965, Murray Morgan wrote, The Dry Years, which might be subtitled 'The Fall and Rise of John Barleycorn, ' is a delightful blend of scholarship, narrative exposition and wit. ...Clark is knowing and acid about alcohol as a class problem. he points out that the drys were usually led by upperclass types whose peers would derive benefit by better habits in the working class. He does not, however, fall into the trap of attributing the attitudes of the reformers to hypocrisy. The drys were awash with sincerity. ...It is one of the many merits of this...