Quotes from Timothy Egan

could not find a lawyer in Muncie brave enough to take on his defense of free speech.

Stephenson's crime went unpunished.

Steve offered to pay his victim a month's salary if she would write a statement saying he had not attacked her. She refused. But because she was engaged and worried about what her fiancé would think if she had to go through a trial with a man who would try to destroy her, she backed off. The case disappeared.

Indiana embraced him, even after news of his assault had made its way into the state.

There were still men walking the streets of 1922 Indiana who had fought against the slaveholders, and who believed that liberating humans held as property had been the highest calling of their lives. Among them was William H. Stern, a white man raised on a farm north of Indianapolis.

The biggest achievement of the Oregon Klan—the vote by a majority of the people to essentially outlaw Catholic schools in the state—also fell.

STUDENTS ROUT KLANSMEN

With a snicker, the cop said that the editor could always take his complaint to higher-ups—Muncie's chief of police or the Delaware County sheriff, both Klansmen who'd recently passed by in front of them. Or he could go directly to the prosecutor, the one hidden by mask and robe at the head of the Klan parade.

One chart showed how quickly the grass was overturned. In 1879, ten million acres were plowed. Fifty years later, the total was one hundred million acres. Grass was needed to hold the soil in place; it was nature's way of adapting to the basic conditions of the plains, the high wind and low rainfall.

the mist of early morning peels away to reveal the same sight, the untended casualties of Western man's war with the rain forest.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poet and philosopher who thought reality was best experienced through a soul in tune with the rhythms of the earth.

In Muncie, the "Constitution had ceased to function," wrote the Chicago Tribune, after the Klan had established a "super-government" not based on the rule of law.

The vices of these savages are very few when compared to ours... One does not see here greed for another man's wealth, because articles of prime necessity are very few and all are common. Hunger obliges no one to rob on the highways, or to resort to piracy. The natural bounty was so great that the natives actually fought some wars with food, trying to outdo one another with culinary gifts at their potlatches.

The house was thick with politicians and thick with Klansmen, one and the same.

feared going to the police. No one would believe her, as he warned her afterward. And even if they did, they wouldn't dare to go after him.

Loveliness, he said, is paid for in the currency of suffering.

News accounts of the riot would give rise to a story that still lives, that the "Fighting Irish" nickname was forever set by the clash of Notre Dame against the Ku Klux Klan on May 17, 1924.

Polygamy was common [amongst the Navajo], but women had superior property rights, owning sheep and the houses. A man who deserted his family would be destitute -- a powerful incentive to stay married.

He told her he "controlled every court in Indiana." For $30, he could get someone to sign an affidavit to anything he dictated, he boasted. For $50, he could get a man killed.

while the number of Cascade hikers has increased sixfold since 1960, nearly a third of the trail mileage has been lost to logging and neglect.

The [Apache] tribe was under siege by government agents, who had jailed some of the medicine men for practicing their rituals. Freedom of religion was cherished as a sacrosanct American right -- everywhere, that is, but on the archipelago of Indian life.

the Allotment Act of 1887. Under this act, each male Indian head of household was given a chunk of reservation land, between 40 and 160 acres, which he could then sell as an individual... Nationwide, Indian landholdings shrank from 140 million acres to 48 million in less than fifty years... Today, two-thirds of all Indian-reservation property is not owned by the tribes, a legacy of the Allotment Act.

the most powerful Klan in history, the only realm that had complete political control of a state.

Eighty-four islands in the San Juan chain are wildlife refuges; of those, humans are allowed to visit only three.