Remembering a feathered river across the sky

Sometimes there are anniversaries that we should remember but not celebrate. This month marks such an occasion: A hundred years ago this September, Martha, the last passenger pigeon, died in the Cincinnati Zoo.  On the Midwestern frontier, billions of the birds had once gathered, so many they formed “a feathered river across the sky.” By […]

In 1832, when Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall was pondering the fate of Baptist missionary Samuel Worcester, who’d been jailed by Georgia state militia for preaching the Christian gospel to Cherokee Indians, little did Marshall know that his ruling would one day reroute rivers, legalize hundreds of Indian casinos from coast to coast, and […]

Hunting fascinates me, and I read everything I can about it. So I was taken aback to read recently that in my state of Washington, there are 16,000 fewer hunters than there were five years ago. Another story focused on the failure of our justice system to curb rampant poaching, and I began to wonder […]

Westerners celebrated two birthdays worth noting toward the end of summer, but most paid attention to only one, the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act. The other was the 50th anniversary of the start of construction of the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project in Colorado, which eventually moved a lot of water from the Colorado River Basin to […]