Battling violent storms, forest fire smoke, head winds and fatigue, a pair of Spokane, Washington, aviators flew nonstop across America and back in 1929 to establish a new world record. Their Buhl CA-6 sesquiplane, named Spokane Sun-God, was the first airplane to make a non-stop transcontinental round-trip flight. Sponsored by the National Air Derby Association along with Texaco, who supplied the gas, Buhl Aircraft Company, who provided the plane, and many Spokane citizens and businessmen, pilot Nick Mamer and mechanic Art Walker took to the skies at 6 p.m. and headed west into the sunset from Felts Field on August 15th as a crowd of thousands looked on.

I am proud to announce the publication of my new book, Exploring Maritime Washington—a History and Guide. Each of the places covered in its pages has a connection to Washington’s maritime history, whether a popular tourist destination or a hidden gem known only to longtime locals. Exploring Maritime Washington provides visitors with a fun and easy way to enjoy each community while learning about Washington’s nautical history. By visiting and experiencing Washington’s special maritime features—museums, ships, lighthouses, waterfronts and all—the heritage traveler can obtain an authentic understanding of maritime Washington’s diverse history and culture.

Before there were roads around the Puget Sound region, there were rivers. Before the stagecoaches, there were Salish canoes. And before the planes, the trains, and the automobiles...there was the water, and the ships that traveled upon it. By the 1860s, there were hundreds of steamers crisscrossing the Puget Sound, every day, all day. There were, in fact, so many ships upon the water at any given time, that an article in the Tacoma Daily Ledger on February 21, 1889, implied that when viewed from a lofty point, the fleet looked like a swarm of mosquitos skimming over the green waters of the Sound. And the nickname stuck.

There are hundreds of different museums scattered far and wide across Washington state. Many of them are focused on the history of their particular city, county, or region. Others feature arguably some of the most interesting, thought-provoking, and unique art and sculpture in the world. And a few have captured more of a niche area, showcasing things like robots, quilts, and puppets. But the thing that binds these varied institutions together is that most of them are members of the Washington Museum Association, a nonprofit organization first conceptualized in 1979. Holding its inaugural meeting the following year in Ellensburg, Washington, the Washington Museum Association was established to represent and serve museums of all types and sizes throughout the state.

Built in 1849 to project American power and secure American interest in the Puget Sound Region, Fort Steilacoom played a key role in helping to settle what was then Oregon Territory. It served as the focal point for the Treaty Wars of the 1850s and played witness to the judicial murder of an innocent man - Chief Leschi of the Nisqually Tribe - about which you can learn more in my Medicine Creek Treaty podcast episode. Fort Steilacoom also rose to the forefront of history during the San Juan Island Pig War of 1859, again which you can learn about from that episode of the Washington Our Home podcast.

Just after one o'clock in the morning, on a frigid, starless night in March 1910, more than a hundred souls aboard Great Northern Railway's Spokane Local No. 25, a passenger train, and Fast Mail Train No. 27 slept tightly bundled in their cars. They'd been stuck near Wellington in King County, Washington, for almost a week...waiting as railroad crews attempted to clear the tracks of snow, which had been accumulating at a record pace. Each time they tried, their enormous rotary plows either broke down, ran out of fuel or got stuck, forcing crews to try digging out from the five-to-eight-foot snow drifts by hand while passengers hunkered down and waited for the blizzard to pass. But it didn't pass. The snow just kept on coming. High above them loomed the peak of Windy Mountain, and below them, the Tye Creek ravine. On the last day of February, the snow turned to rain. Lightning and thunder erupted across the Cascade Mountains, and one fateful lightning strike touched off the deadliest avalanche in United States history.

Two weeks after Valentine's Day, 2001, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake struck the south sound region of Washington state near where the Nisqually River empties into Puget Sound. It was nearly 11 a.m. on a Wednesday, and the state legislature was in full swing. The violent tremors lasted nearly a minute, rocking the state capital of Olympia and the nearby cities of Lacey, Tumwater, Nisqually, DuPont, and Shelton. The shocks registered as far away as Oregon, Idaho, and Canada. Property damage estimates up and down western Washington totaled in the billions. One person died of a heart attack and nearly four hundred were injured. This was a large earthquake that hit in the Puget Sound region…but it wasn't the first. Not by a long shot.

Born Esther Pariseau in 1823, the third of 12 children, in a farmhouse three miles from Saint-Martin, Laval, Quebec, this Canadian Religious Sister grew up to lead members of her congregation to the Pacific Northwestern United States where they established a network of schools and healthcare facilities to serve the American settlers in that new and remote part of the country. She was the first female architect in British Columbia, and she had a profound impact on what would become Washington Territory and later, Washington State. This is the story of Mother Joseph of the Sacred Heart, who became known as "The Builder" after she designed and supervised construction of 29 schools and hospitals in Washington, one of which was Seattle's very first hospital.

Marcus and Narcissa Whitman were Christian missionaries who left their homes in upstate New York and traveled with another missionary couple, Henry and Eliza Spalding, to what was then called Oregon Country in 1836. Their mission? To "Christianize" Indians. In fact, Oregon wasn't even a territory yet. The United States government didn't have any programs in Oregon Country, which at the time consisted of the present-day states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and parts of Wyoming and Montana. The Whitmans and the Spaldings were among the very first Americans of European decent to travel across North America by land to the western part of Oregon Country. Eleven years after the Whitmans arrived, a group of Cayuse ambushed and killed them along with eleven other people in what became a pivotal event in Washington state and Pacific Northwest history called The Whitman Massacre, but the story you might think you know may very well be appended - or upended - or both by the time we're is finished.

Slade Gorton was an esteemed intellectual, an accomplished attorney, a shrewd political opponent, an Air Force colonel, a baseball nut…and one of the greatest public servants Washington State has ever known. After 92 years of working on behalf of others, the nonagenarian solon died last month, on August 19th. If you've never heard of Slade Gorton, you'll get a great idea of who the man was by reading his obituary from the Washington Post. No one knew Slade better than his wife, his children, his closest friends…and perhaps his biographer, Chief Historian for the Washington Secretary of State's Office, John Hughes. In 2011, Hughes published a 384-page book titled "Slade Gorton: A Half Century in Politics," on behalf of the Washington State Heritage Center's Legacy Project - now known as Legacy Washington. It is probably the most historically accurate, exquisitely detailed, and anecdotally entertaining work about the man known as a scion, a patrician, and one of the most intellectually astute politicians this state has ever seen.

In Part 1, we learned how to pronounce some of thestate's challenging county names. In Part 2, we reviewed dozens of tricky city names around Washington. And in Part 3, we started tackling some of those indigenous names found so often around Washington. But there were too many to cover in a single episode...so this, my friends, is Say WA Part 3.5! We'll cover the rest of the Tribes found in western Washington and learn about some of our state's place names that have their origin in the various indigenous dialects. All that and more coming up on this episode of the WashingtonOur Home Podcast.

In 1854, the Medicine Creek Treaty between regional Native American tribes and Washington's territorial government kicked off a years-long conflict that forever changed the story of the Pacific Northwest. Sixty-eight years later, in 1922, the Sacajawea Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution placed a bronze plaque commemorating the momentous treaty, upon the single remaining Douglas Fir that remained at the place where the treaty was signed. It became forever known as "Treaty Tree." Today, that tree is gone, but the clues left behind may be able to point us to the exact spot where it once stood among a grove of fir trees that bore witness to a pivotal moment in the history of Washington state.

We've talked about the state's challenging county names. We've reviewed dozens of tricky city names around Washington. Now, in Part III of our Say WA! pronunciation series, we'll be tackling those tribal names found so often around our great state. There are 574 federally recognized Indian Tribes in the United States, and 29 of them have ancestral lands here within the Washington state borders. There are also a handful of non-federally recognized tribes, some still fighting to gain recognition and independence. From east to west and north to south, the influence of our region's indigenous people is embedded in everything.

I've spent a lot of time in Ocean Shores, Washington, over the years...hiking around Damon Point, rock-hopping at the north jetty and exploring the Coastal Interpretive Center (which is absolutely worth seeing, if you ever get the chance). But one of the more memorable moments in my Ocean Shores experience was getting to "discover" a shipwreck as the tempestuous weather began shifting the dunes and slowly exposing its hull at the beginning of the century. That ship, it turns out, was the S.S. Catala - a Canadian coastal passenger and cargo steamship built in 1925.

There are 281 official cities and towns in the State of Washington, according to the Washington State Association of Cities, and every one of them has a unique story to tell. Some of them have hundreds of stories…others, perhaps just one major story. All of them have their own character, vibe, ambiance, and backstory, and many of them have weird, interesting or unusual ways they got their names. Why is there no University in University Place? What happened that earned one town the name Slaughter? And what exactly do people do in Humptulips? Fear not, my loyal listeners…all will be revealed in this Washington City Names episode of Washington Our Home.

At the very end of Washington State Route 506 lies a tiny, well-kept community that bills itself as the town with two histories. And both of those histories are pretty darned amazing. Heard of Ryderwood, Washington? Neither had I until I was approached by a representative of their historical society. And the story she told me had me fascinated…I decided I had to visit to learn more. Ryderwood is located about halfway between Centralia and Longview in western Washington, just a bit west of the I-5 corridor. A Google satellite map of the area shows a small brownish patch at the top of Cowlitz County just below the Lewis County line, surrounded on three of four sides by inches and inches of deep green forests. In fact, that’s exactly why Ryderwood was created there in the first place…for the timber.

Today, we're beginning the creation of THE definitive pronunciation guide for Washington State. This will be part one of a three-part series looking at Washington's notoriously difficult county, city and geographic names, so you'd better favorite these episodes if you want to sound like you're from here. For this episode, we'll stick to the tricky county names. Of course, we'll also have our monthly trivia quiz, and we'll pepper in some Fast Facts to learn about how many of these places got their names. I'll also have a few stories of my own to share about these places. And I'm going to plug these names into a text-to-speech app and see how the robots would pronounce them.