This book is a real story about an ordinary family from Albia, Iowa, who in 1862 crossed the Oregon Trail and settled in the lower Powder River Valley in what today is Baker City, Oregon. Within two years, family members were part of a thriving dry-goods and mercantile business in the gold-mining town of Mormon Basin, selling rubber boots, shovels, and liquor to both American and Chinese miners. By the late 1860s, the easy gold had been panned and sluiced out so the miners moved on to chase bigger dreams in newer places. So too did some of the family members; they sold their business interests and with a saddlebag full of gold rode north to Umatilla County, Oregon, where in 1871 they started a ranch and cattle business. Portions of James Shumway’s Couse Creek Ranch near Milton-Freewater are still owned by descendants; it is an Oregon State Centennial Ranch. This book uses old photographs, letters, documents, business journals, personal diaries, and contemporary research to recount 150 years of Barton–Shumway family history in eastern Oregon. It is a story told through the lives of some of the real people who survived it.
Burgundy, Bordeaux, Champagne. The names of these and other French regions bring to mind time-honored winemaking practices. Yet the link between wine and place, in French known as terroir, was not a given. In The Sober Revolution, Joseph Bohling inverts our understanding of French wine history by revealing a modern connection between wine and place, one with profound ties to such diverse and sometimes unlikely issues as alcoholism, drunk driving, regional tourism, Algeria’s independence from French rule, and integration into the European Economic Community. In the 1930s, cheap, mass-produced wines from the Languedoc region of southern France and French Algeria dominated French markets. Artisanal wine producers, worried about the impact of these "inferior" products on the reputation of their wines, created a system of regional appellation labeling to reform the industry in their favor by linking quality to the place of origin. At the same time, the loss of Algeria, once the world’s largest wine exporter, forced the industry to rethink wine production. Over several decades, appellation producers were joined by technocrats, public health activists, tourism boosters, and other dynamic economic actors who blamed cheap industrial wine for hindering efforts to modernize France. Today, scholars, food activists, and wine enthusiasts see the appellation system as a counterweight to globalization and industrial food. But, as The Sober Revolution reveals, French efforts to localize wine and integrate into global markets were not antagonistic but instead mutually dependent. The time-honored winemaking practices that we associate with a pastoral vision of traditional France were in fact a strategy deployed by the wine industry to meet the challenges and opportunities of the post-1945 international economy. France’s luxury wine producers were more market savvy than we realize.
The Verde Valley the seemingly easy route to West Texas was in fact a land of peril, adventure, and near mythic heroes. Historic Camp Verde has long been a strategic stronghold guarding the pass, the valley and the many trails converging at this river crossing. As frontiersman and settlers pushed through the pass and Native Americans responded with violent force, the famed Texas Rangers attempted to control the region. Officially established in 1856, the camp would become the testing ground for the Army's Camel Experiment and an outpost for Robert E. Lee's legendary Second U.S. Cavalry. Join local historian Joseph Luther as he narrates the tumultuous and uniquely Texan history of Camp Verde.
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