"The story of the land in the Northwest flows from the cataclysmic ice-age floods. So it only follows that the stories of the people in this terrain are inextricably linked to the aftereffects of that great deluge. These are the genesis stories of a region. Included are the controversy over the provenance and ownership of a meteor that fell to earth in rural Oregon; the mystery of the aurora borealis as observed by 18th-century explorer David Thompson;...

"Sand and stone are Earth's fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life-defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent's past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward her--paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land--lie...