Mossback's Northwest

A rodeo champion from Palouse, WA, became a Hollywood stuntman just as "action Westerns" took off at the box office. Yakima Canutt could leapfrog onto a horse, fall off it, stage a wagon wreck or a fight, and usually as the double for a star. John Wayne studied Canutt, and modeled his famous walk and talk after him.

While doing research on Prohibition in Seattle, we came across more than moonshine: the brewing of “bathtub” sake.

While digging a manmade pond on Orcas Island 10 years ago, a crew turned up some ancient bones that turned out to be hugely important: 12,000-year-old giant bison bones that showed signs of butchering by humans.

The first Hollywood movie ever shot in Seattle was "Tugboat Annie," which turned into a movie series and a TV show celebrating a woman tugboat captain. It was a smash hit. Annie was a salty, formidable woman who was able to constantly outsmart her rivals.

This guy was the last of the old West style outlaws in the Northwest, broke out of prison, shot guards, sheriffs and accomplices and was subject of the region’s greatest manhunt. He was finally found working on a ranch in eastern Washington and died in a shootout there with a local posse.

Tide flats, Hooverville, Kingdome, Centurylink—a chunk of SoDo has gone through dramatic change.

For centuries, there is evidence that Japanese vessels have washed up on the Washington coast. Evidence exists in finds of iron tools in pre-contact archaeological sites. But probably the most dramatic was the arrival of three survivors of a drifting junk from Japan in the 1840s.

Knute Berger strolls around town, observing while trying to find historical origins to the most frequently-used phrase about Seattle's culture.