TOUGH MEN, TOUGH COUNTRY
By
The author, a resident of the Pacific Northwest of twenty years' standing, has more in mind here than the telling of seventeen true stories; his intention has been to ""capture the feeling of the Northwest country"" through each of these adventurous tales. Beginning with the ill-fated voyage of John Jacob Astor's ship Tonquin to the mouth of the Columbia in 1810, he ranges on through the frontier ays, the Indian wars, the age of the cattle kings, outlaws, and vigilantes, and hen on up through ""The Twentieth Century's Indomitable Breed"" with that great esperado, Harry Tracy, and the last of the gory train robberies. Carefully varying his material, he switches to forest fires, grizzly bears, lost tenderfeet hunted by bloodhounds, the first swimming of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, epic rescues of rowning sailors, and the ""Big Blow of '62"". Some of this will be old stuff to ost readers, and very little indeed has not been told in print before; but Mr. Lucia's enthusiasm for his adoptive home region is infectious, and he has a swift, ncluttered style which should carry all but the most lethargic readers straight through to the end.