Mossback's Northwest

Prospectors headed to the 1897 gold rush in Alaska had to bring tons of provisions with them. Some imagined the possibility of airships carrying freight and gold back and forth to the Klondike, and suddenly, airships were being "seen" all over the world.

Bustling Seattle was building one freeway after another in the 1960s and 70s. One was going to slice right through the Washington Park Arboretum, until citizen activists stopped it in its tracks.

George Bush, a free black man, settled what is now known as Tumwater in 1850. He was a respected community leader, and his family became part of Washington's most important institutions.

The UW "Boys in the Boat' crew is famous for beating the Nazis in the 1936 Olympics, but there was another race that pitted the vaunted Husky team against Native Swinomish paddlers.

Wealthy English aristocrat and musician sir Thomas Beecham came to Seattle during WWII to be the Seattle Symphony's conductor for two years. Outspoken and fiery in temperament, he made a statement about Seattle's artistic life that stings citizens even today. But did he actually say it?

Seattle World's Fair organizers desperately wanted President John F. Kennedy to visit. He couldn’t, but he did glimpse the site. Proof lies in a recently discovered photograph taken in the shadow of the Space Needle.

In 1919, during an Armistice Day parade, a gun battle between Wobblies (IWW) and the American Legion left five men dead, and scars in the Northwest psyche. It was a violent clash between two ideologies -- the anti Bolshevik American Legion and the radical socialists known as the Industrial Workers of the World.

The Olympia oyster is the Pacific Coast's only indigenous oyster. Tiny compared to other oysters, the Olympia was for decades raked out of Washington's beds by the ton, to feeding hungry gold diggers in California and Northwestern lumbermen. Invasive Japanese oysters took over its habitat, but the might Olympia might be making a comeback, thanks to interested shellfish farmers.