Stewart Holbrook — high-school dropout, logger, journalist, storyteller, and historian — was one of the best-loved figures in the Pacific Northwest during the two decades preceding his death in 1964. This anthology collects two dozen of his best pieces about his adopted home, the Pacific Northwest.

Holbrook believed in "lowbrow or non-stuffed shirt history." Holbrook's lowbrow Northwest ranges from British Columbia logging camps to Oregon ranches, and is peopled with fascinating characters like Liverpool Liz of the old Portland waterfront, the over-sexed prophet Joshua II of the Church of the Brides of Christ in Corvallis, and Arthur Boose, the last Wobbly paper boy. Here are stories of forgotten scandals and crimes, forest fires, floods, and other catastrophes, stories of workers, underdogs, scoundrels, dreamers, and fanatics, stories that bring the past to life.