Wildmen, Wobblies & Whistle Punks
Brian Booth and Stewart Holbrook
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.
About the author
Like H. L. Davis, Brian Booth was a native of Douglas County, Oregon. He was the founder of the Oregon Institute of Literary Arts (now Literary Arts) and the editor of Wildmen, Wobblies, and Whistle Punks: Stewart Holbrook’s Lowbrow Northwest as well as co-editor of Davis Country. He practiced law in Portland, Oregon.
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Stewart Holbrook was born in Vermont in 1893 and came to the Northwest in 1920. After working as a logger, he moved in 1923 to Portland and spent the rest of his life writing. He was a fast and productive writer, regularly turning out 3,000 to 5,000 words a day. He wrote for the Oregonian newspaper, as well as articles for magazines ranging from the New Yorker to Startling Detective. He also wrote, co-authored, and edited over three dozen books. His first book, Holy Old Mackinaw: A Natural History of the American Lumberjack, was published in 1938, and it made him a national figure.
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An Introduction to Stewart Holbrook
Death and times of a Prophet
Daylight in the Swamp
The Affair at Copperfield
Cargoes of Maidens
Anarchists at Home
The Wildest Man of the West
Fire in the Bush
The Three Sirens of Portland
The Cattle King
The Original Nature Man
The Wobblies Come
The Great Tillamook Fire
Saloon in the Timber
Bunco Kelly, King of the Crimps
Opal the Understanding Heart
The Legend of Jim Hill
Erickson's Elbow Bending for Giants
The Gorse of Bandon
Whistle Punks
Harry Tracy: "King of Western Robbers"
Disaster in June
The Aurora Communists
First Bomb
The Great Homestead Murders
Lumberjacks' Saturday Night
The Last of the Wobblies
Additional Reading
Editor's Note
Acknowledgments
The OSU Press mourns the loss of attorney, author, and cultural activist Brian Booth, who died of cancer at his home in Portland on March 7.