Aspies of the Pacific Northwest....UNITE :D!

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Just commenting because I want to subscribe to the thread but I don't see how without posting at dinging "Notify me when a reply is posted". Yep, feelin' lazy ATM.

ooh ooh i live in that place, with the potatoes, and the panhandle and the upper portion of the bear name and u unsult urself when ya say it

Western Washington!

Just wanted to make honorable mention of August 6 as the day Harry Tracy bought the farm back in 1902. To those of you who don't recognize the name Harry Tracy, he was the Pacific Northwest's number one old west desperado, just as the Southwest claims Billy the Kid as their number one bad man, the Midwest Jesse James, and the Rocky Mountain west claims Butch Cassidy. Unfortunately I think, we here in the Northwest are so forward looking that we often forget our old west past, with the exception of sanitized accounts of the Oregon Trail and Indian wars.
Harry, whose real name was Harry Severns, had been a logging camp and railroad worker from Wisconsin, hopping trains like a hobo, and usually on the run from the law as he wandered throughout the west. Tracy had earlier earned a reputation in the late 1890's as a badman following a successful prison break in Utah after a burglary conviction, and the murder of a prominent rancher in the infamous outlaw hideout of Browns Park, as well as perpetrating a number of hold ups.
With a new Partner named David Merrill, Tracy drifted down the Pacific coast, committing armed robberies, till they were finally caught, convicted, and imprisoned in the Oregon State penitentiary. Three years later in the year 1902, after having guns smuggled into the prison, the two desperadoes shot their way out of the prison, Tracy killing three guards in the process. What followed was the greatest manhunt in old west history, during which time reporters from newspapers from all over America and Europe covered the story at the scene. No outlaw had been given such media coverage since the days of the James gang.
Tracy left a trail of robberies and dead bodies in his wake as he fled through Oregon and Washington. Among the dead was Tracy's own partner, David Merrill, who Tracy shot after reading a newspaper account of how Merrill had sold him out to the law after being apprehended in Portland. Tracy went on the murder three more lawmen in the Seattle area. Tracy's course toward Canada abruptly changed, and he disappeared east into the Cascade mountains.
He reemerged in eastern Washington, where he told a friend on a ranch how he was heading back to Hole-In-The-Wall country in Wyoming, where he would be safe among other desperadoes. Unknown to him, Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch, and the other outlaws there had been driven out - - in large part because of Tracy's own criminality had been the straw that broke the camel's back, bringing in law enforcement and manhunters.
The trail ended for Harry Tracy on a ranch between Creston and Davenport Washington, where he had been led to by a teenage cowboy who he had met on the road. Apparently believing he was safe with the two ranchers who he had come to trust, he had stayed too long. A posse from Creston, picking up on a tip from the young cowboy, closed in on the badman. A gun battle erupted, in which Tracy was severally wounded and trapped in a nearby wheat field. Once the larger Davenport posse arrived, there were enough men to ring off the field. If Harry had any hope of escape, he had lost too much blood by nightfall. The posse heard a gun shot from inside the field. The next morning, the posse men had discovered the desperado had turned his six gun on himself to avoid capture and hanging.
Many historians of the old west believe the era of the western desperado on horseback had ended on August 6, 1902 with the death of harry Tracy. To be sure, there were outlaws after Tracy's death, but he was the last to gain such national and international notoriety. And that era ended here, in the Pacific Northwest.
I am not glorifying Harry Tracy as a murderer and thief. But without a doubt, he provides our region of the country with color and nostalgia which many people native to our part of the country don't even know existed.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Like I said, it's pretty typical how our wild west history was ignored. We Northwesterners do have a wild west history, which in fact lasted longer than a lot of other parts of the west, lasting into the early twentieth century. I think we have ourselves to blame - we Northwesterners are so eager to be part of the modern liberal coast (and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that), that we very often purposely forget our own old time history. But yes, we did - and still do - have cowboys. But a severe winter in I believe the 1880's killed off much of the Northwest's cattle industry; the rest of the west just barely made it through. As far as American settlement of the Northwest, the process in fact had been going on from the first half of the 18th century onward, much of it tumultuous and violent toward Indians, Chinese, small settlers, labor radicals - in other words, just about anyone who wasn't either white, or rich or powerful. And there were of course badmen like Harry Tracy who found law enforcement to be either too over worked, lax, corrupt, or indifferent, so that they could steal and kill all they wanted.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Oooh, why am I just now finding this thread?

Male, living in Vancouver, BC, here. Originally from the Southern US, but I visited here and I fell in love with the Northwest.