← Stories of Pacific Powerland
Stories of Pacific Powerland — 1966
33 episodes broadcast in 1966.
The story of Yakima, Washington, which in the 1880s picked up and moved some four miles -- buildings and all -- to meet the new Northern Pacific rail line after the railroad bypassed the original townsite.
How the glass fishing floats of Japanese and other Pacific fleets, carried thousands of miles by wind and current, came to wash up as prized beachcombers' treasures along the Oregon and Northwest coast.
Thompson's Mills near Shedd, Oregon -- the Calapooia River grist mill raised in 1858 as the Boston Mills and long run by the Thompson family -- which survives as the oldest water-powered mill in the state.
Almost certainly the U.S. Air Force Survival School, which relocated to Fairchild Air Force Base near Spokane, Washington, in 1966 -- the very year of this broadcast -- to train aircrew in wilderness survival, evasion, resistance and escape.
The Willamette Meteorite -- Tomanawos to the Clackamas Chinook, and the largest meteorite ever found in the United States -- carried to the Willamette Valley by Ice Age floods and unearthed near West Linn, Oregon, in 1902.
The Native legend of the Bridge of the Gods and the warring brothers Wy'east and Pahto -- the peaks we now call Mount Hood and Mount Adams -- whose fiery quarrel is said to have shattered the great natural land bridge over the Columbia.
Oregon's covered bridges -- the roofed wooden spans, once numbering some 450, that early builders sheathed to shield their trusses from the rain, leaving the state the largest surviving concentration in the West.
John Day, the Virginia-born hunter of the 1811-12 Astor overland party who, robbed and stripped by Natives near the river's mouth, left his name on the Oregon river, town and fossil beds that bear it today.
The cattle empire of Henry Miller and Charles Lux, whose Pacific Live Stock Company grazed well over a million acres from California across Nevada and into the ranch country of eastern Oregon.
Lumberman Julius Neils, whose J. Neils Lumber Company built its Northwest fortune on the sister mills at Klickitat, Washington, and Libby, Montana, and pioneered sustained-yield forestry in the 1930s.
The eastern-Oregon town of Echo on the Umatilla River -- an Oregon Trail crossing and the site of Fort Henrietta -- platted in 1880 and named for a settler's young daughter.
Marie Dorion, the Ioway-Metis woman and only female member of the 1811 Astor overland expedition, whose winter survival trek through the Snake River country to the Walla Walla ranks among the Northwest's great endurance stories.
The short-lived Pony Express of 1860-61, whose relay riders raced the mail nearly two thousand miles across the West until the transcontinental telegraph made them obsolete.
Lt. John Mullan and the military wagon road his crews cut in 1859-60 from Fort Walla Walla to Fort Benton -- the first wagon route across the northern Rockies into the inland Northwest.
Likely a story of the first women to serve on juries in the Northwest -- Washington empaneled an all-woman jury at Olympia in December 1910 and, in 1911, became the first state in the nation to authorize women as jurors. (The exact case the vignette recounts is not confirmed.)
◆ ◆ ◆
Other seasons: 1967