Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0295956801, Hardcover)
With the same ability to make personalities and events come alive that characterizes his classic
Skid Road, Murray Morgan here tells the colorful story of southern Puget Sound, where major events of Washington's history took place, and of Tacoma, the area's principal city. Drawing upon the original journals and reports, Morgan tells his story largely in terms of individuals, interweaving portraits of well-known historical figures with those who are more obscure but who have a special significance.
Journalist and historian Murray Morgan (1916-2000) was the author of more than twenty books, including Skid Road: An Informal Portrait of Seattle and The Last Wilderness. He worked for Time magazine, the New York Herald Tribune, and CBS News before returning to Washington where he taught at Tacoma Community College and for fifteen years hosted the early morning radio show "Our Town, Our World."
(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 24 Jan 2013 09:02:10 -0500)
In grade school, I lived just down the street from Morgan and once interviewed him for a school project. During the interview, me and my partner quickly forgot the questions we had and ended up just listening fascinated as Morgan wove a story of the early history of Puyallup, a nearby Tacoma suburb. I brought along my dad's copy of Puget's Sound for an autograph, but hadn't gotten around to reading it until now, more than twenty years later.
Morgan is a great story teller and his history of Tacoma is a series of interwoven stories of the people, both locally and from distant Railroad and Wall Street board rooms, who shaped the city from a marshy rival to Seattle for the terminus of the Northern Pacific Railroad to a thriving industrial city.
Much has changed in Pierce County in the thirty years since the book was written, but the stories of the early settlement are still fascinating and I'd recommend this for anyone who is interested in the early history of Tacoma. (