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Green Timber On the flood tide to fortune in the great Northwest Thomas Ripley
Green Timber On the flood tide to fortune in the great Northwest by Thomas Ripley
Hard cover with dust jacket (Has plastic cover)
Copyright 1968
126 pages
Green Timber On the Flood Tide to Fortune in the Great Northwest by THOMAS EMERSON RIPLEY
Here is the sprightly recollection of three of the most crowded and turbulent years in the history of the Pacific Northwest, as lived and remembered by one of the region's more renowned characters: Thomas Emerson Rip-ley-businessman, artist, and witty observer of the life that surrounded him in one of the last expressions of the frontier experience.
Fresh from the ivied halls of Yale, Ripley headed west in 1890 for the beginning of a new life in the bustling timber empire of the Puget Sound country. Many years and several successes later, he decided to recount the joyous days of his youth in the Northwest, when every man cast his fortune, big or small, in the lottery of progress and hoped for the best. The result was Green Timber, whose lively text and forty-eight pages of period photo-graphs illuminate the life and times of a representative western boom town and tell the story of a young man's apprenticeship in the trade of scrambling after the main chance.
Green Timber, in describing the rise and fall of Tacoma in its early boom-and-bust years, is a study in the municipal self-confidence typical of the nineteenth century west. Superbly conscious of its own importance ("Watch Tacoma Grown Ripley's remembered town considered itself the center of a universe crowded with opportunities for any man with cash, credit or gumption enough to take a flyer. Fortunes in timber, real estate, and ship-ping accumulated rapidly, until the nation-wide depression of 1893 cut short her glory days of freewheeling western enterprise.
Thomas Emerson Ripley plunged into Taco-ma's world of rambunctious energy with all the wide eyed enthusiasm of youth: My welcome into the world of go-getters was hearty and warming to the cockles of the heart. Would I join the Commercial Club? Of course, I would. I would join anything. The pin feathers of a fledgling industrialist pricked through my hide. ...I loved it." That enthusi-asm-and a determination that would not admit the finality of defeat-carried him through the lean years of the depression and on to a long and prosperous career.
But Ripley never forgot the early days of Tacoma. As in his earlier classic reminiscence, A Vermont Boyhood, he enriched the pages of Green Timber with a vivid, impressionistic prose and a sharp eye for the sardonic that limned the booming Pacific Northwest with wit, verve, and imagination. And in his sum-mation of his well-loved town's reaction to the bitterness of the depression years, he leaves us with a poignant reminder of the vigorous life-styles of a vanished frontier: "A Puget Sound mist drifts across my memory of the town in those days of the big depression, obscuring all memory of despair and then parting to reveal a sun-lit glimpse of the com-munity of the busted, accepting without a yelp the beating we had taken for our collective lunacy. Hope deferred, yes, and again deferred, but I cannot remember that it made our hearts sick. We were very young or very dumb and in that bright lexicon of youth we failed to find the word 'fail'."
Accompanied by forty-eight pages of period photographs from the files of the Washington State Historical Society, which document the thriving life of Tacoma in all its phases, and an introduction by Bruce Le Roy, director of the Society, Green Timber will long stand as one of the most illuminating profiles in the history of western cities.
Readers of Green Timber will also enjoy the nostalgic story of miners and manners on the Nevada frontier, Lady in Boomtown, by Mrs. Hugh Brown, with an in-troduction by Walter VanTilburg Clark,
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