Quotes from Timothy Egan

The Klan prided itself on how quickly it could spread a lie: from a kitchen table to the whole state in six hours or less.

The problem with history was that it was written by the survivors, and they usually wrote in the sunshine on harvest day, from victory stands.

Though a degree from Yale was not required, Pinchot wanted his foresters to be able to write well, for the numerous reports that their enemies in Congress would be second-guessing.

Naturalist Roger Tory Peterson has calculated that the Olympic Rain Forest is weighted down with more living matter than any other place on earth.

Better for a man to fail, he said, even "to fail greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

the Forest Service has punched 343,000 miles of logging roads into the vast stands of public trees—more than seven times the 44,000 miles of road built by the national highway system.

by 1900, the tribes owned less than 2 percent of the land they once possessed. Entire languages had already disappeared—more than a loss of words, a loss of a way to look at the world.

Rioting over food: how could this be? Here was all this grain, food enough to feed half the world, sitting in piles at the train station, going to waste. Something was out of balance.

Their humanity has been forgotten," Grinnell said of the predominant way most outsiders looked at Indians—as either savages or victims.

A decent man would stand out like a cactus on an ice floe.

no river in North America except the Mississippi is more powerful than the Columbia; it carries a quarter-million cubic feet of water per second to the ocean, ten times the flow of the Colorado, twice the discharge of the Nile into the Mediterranean.

At least fifty people were taken down to the Trinity River bottoms in Dallas for whippings and acid brandings. Should they call the police, they would be reporting something already known and even encouraged within the blue wall, for a majority of Dallas officers were now oath-bound members of the hooded order. Proof of Malcolm X's later observation that the Klan had 'changed its bedsheets for a policeman's uniform

Good pictures, Curtis explained, are not products of chance, but come from long hours of study.

Every bit of water falling on all of France, channeled into one drainpipe—that's similar to what goes into the Columbia, or at least a shallow part of it. The river's source is a glacial drip 2,619 feet above sea level in the foothills of the Canadian Purcells; by its midway point in a high desert, the Columbia has a depth several hundred feet below the ocean plane.

The Columbia River Bar has swallowed more ships, about 2,100 at last count, than any other location on the Pacific north of Mexico.

It scares them because of the forced intimacy with a place that gives nothing back to a stranger, a place where the land and its weather—probably the most violent and extreme on earth—demand only one thing: humility.

I'll take the advice of Labre, the patron saint of wandering souls, who grew up not far from here: 'There is no way. The way is made by walking.

At day's end, he was sitting on his front porch when a member of the Klan walked up the steps of a house nearby and plopped into a chair on the veranda. Once the mask was off, the boy could see that the now visible congregant of the Invisible Empire was his neighbor, Mrs. Crousore.

We are spiritual beings. But for many of us, malnutrition of the soul is a plague of modern life.

Jim Crow was a bipartisan crime.

Much of Texas took its prohibition seriously. Not Dalhart. It took its whiskey seriously, in part because some of the finest corn liquor in America was coming out of the High Plains.