(light whimsical music) - It's a new day, a little gray, a little rainy, brisk morning, fresh air.

There's nothing like the Northwest.

It's not always perfect, but it can get a little better with enough caffeine.

In this coffee mecca, I prefer mine from a teabag, not trying to zig when others zag.

You know, we have our faults, challenges, and hardships.

We've made mistakes.

But for all of our faults and challenges, time and time again, Northwesterners have dug in and pulled ahead.

Maybe that's part of our drive and spirit.

What's the day gonna bring?

Is it gonna rain?

I hope so.

The most important thing is what kinda shirt am I gonna wear?

Is it this one?

Is it this one?

Ah, perfect.

One of the things our history teaches us is lessons in resilience, bouncing back from adversity.

Our history is rich with stories, but regular Mossback viewers know, to find the right story, we need the right hat.

Western?

Eh... A trapper.

How about Mariners?

You know, if we're gonna go somewhere...

Here in the Northwest, we face economic downturns, pandemics, catastrophic fires, racism, social unrest, and a litany of bad ideas.

50 years ago, Seattle experienced the Boeing recession.

This was the "turn out the lights" phase of our history.

Boeing had launched its 747 right as the airline market tanked.

They laid off 60,000 of 100,000 workers and regional unemployment spiked to 15%.

The early-'70s were dark times, yet we made it through.

And I would argue we improved Seattle dramatically, despite those challenges.

The 747 led to a big Boeing bounce.

The Pacific Northwest has faced tough times before.

When an industry is collapsing, people suffer, but they can also band together and endure.

Calamities can happen suddenly and gang up on us.

What if we lost several of our most important cities all at one time?

That actually almost happened one year in Washington.

Washington Territory was poised to become a state when this triple tragedy occurred.

Seattle, Ellensburg, Spokane: These three cities burned in quick sequence.

Boom, boom, boom.

First to go was Seattle, Washington's biggest city.

On June 6th, 1889, about 2:00 in the afternoon, a glue pot boiled over in a cabinetmaker's shop at First and Madison.

When a young Swedish immigrant, John E. Black, attempted to douse the flames with water, it simply spread the fire to sawdust.

Soon, the entire business district, which we know today as Pioneer Square, was aflame.

Firefighters attempted to put out the fire, but the tide was out, so they had trouble getting water pressure from Elliott Bay.

In 18 hours, 25 commercial blocks were completely destroyed; over a hundred acres, which includes wharves and railroad terminals.

After the fire, the local militia was called in to prevent looting.

Overnight, Seattle had turned from a bustling port to a tent city full of displaced businesses and people.

Almost exactly a month later on July 4th, fire hit again in Ellensburg, Washington, which is directly east of Seattle.

Ellensburg was a relatively small city compared to Seattle of about 3,000 people, but it was a city of big ambitions.

The people of Ellensburg were lobbying to become the new state's capital.

Boosters had even built a castle-like building to act as the governor's mansion.

At about 10:30 that evening, amid gale force winds, a fire started near a local dry goods store.

What started the fire?

Was it fireworks?

A stove left on?

A still in the basement?

Was it arson?

Disgruntled miners?

Chinese workers?

No one knows for sure.

By early next morning, 10 downtown blocks and over 200 homes had been destroyed.

The fire burnt out because there was nothing left to burn.

There is a surviving witness.

This scorched and blistered mantle clock is said to have survived the fire, according to a note on the back.

It stopped at the time the fire reached it, 11:07 p.m. Last but not least, fire reached one of Washington's most important commercial and transportation hubs that summer: Spokane Falls, now known simply as Spokane.

On August 4th, at 6:00 in the afternoon, fire raged through the downtown area in a place called Railroad Alley.

It was near the railroad tracks where transients and other people could get cheap food, booze, and lodging.

The ignition point was said to be a lunch counter called Wolfe's Lodge.

The summer in Spokane had been uncommonly hot, up in the 90s for days on end.

Wildfire smoke lay heavily on the town from elsewhere in the region.

Fire was explosive.

It raged through downtown.

Like Seattle, the firefighters had trouble with the hoses and getting water on the fire.

A decision was made to blow up some of the brick and stone buildings in the fire's path in order to create a fire line.

Unfortunately, it seemed to just have the effect of exposing the wooden timbers inside and feeding the flames even further.

The best firewall turned out to be the Spokane River.

The fire raged until it reached it.

But in the meantime, it had burned 32 blocks of downtown Spokane.

All three cities emerged like phoenixes from the ashes and used their fires to become more resilient with stone and brick buildings and better water supplies.

Seattle's fire acted as a kind of cleanser.

It killed a million rats.

Recovery wasn't easy for all, however.

For many people, finding a place to live here was a struggle of a different kind.

We have a history of racial exclusion, limiting immigration, barring people of color, racial redlining.

Fires are bad.

So are barriers.

Before the jet age, we lived in the covered wagon age, and that brings us to the story of George Bush.

No, not that George Bush.

(soft folk music) George Bush was a mixed-race black American.

He was born at the end of the 18th century.

He fought in the War of 1812 in the Battle of New Orleans.

And he settled in Missouri and became a prosperous rancher.

But at that time, Missouri was a slave state.

And as a free black, George Bush became uncomfortable and wanted to move someplace where he could be more free.

He packed up his family, his white wife, Isabelle, who was of Irish descent, and five children.

And like thousands of others, they headed out on the Oregon Trail to the Pacific Northwest.

It wasn't cheap to go out on the Oregon Trail at that time.

You had to buy wagons and supplies, not only for your 2,000-mile journey to the Oregon country, but for maybe a year while you set up your homestead.

It was not for the poor, and George had the means to do it.

His father and mother had been servants to a wealthy Philadelphia merchant, and they had inherited some of his fortune and it had come down to George.

George and his family left Missouri in 1844.

And when he arrived in the Oregon country, he learned that they had passed a lash law.

This was a law that excluded blacks from the Oregon country and provided that they be lashed with a whip until they left.

George did not wanna settle in an area that was as bad as the one he had left.

He decided to go north of the Columbia River, where the lash law wouldn't be enforced, to the wilderness of what is now southern Puget Sound.

When George crossed north of the Columbia River, he didn't come alone.

(slow folk music) He came with a group called the Simmons party, white settlers who traveled with him, and they set up a new town near modern-day Olympia called New Market, or we know it today as Tumwater.

In 1845, George established his homestead at a place that is still called Bush Prairie.

Bush and his party quickly established a grist mill.

They staked out their farms.

They started a sawmill.

They began clearing the land and making settlement.

And they attracted other people who came north of the Columbia, mostly Americans.

The thing George became known for was helping other settlers, people who would come at the end of the trail sometime dressed in rags or sick, tired, with few resources.

George established good relations with just about everyone, with the indigenous people, including Chief Leschi.

He was esteemed by his white neighbors.

The homestead law prohibited George from owning the property that he had developed.

But a special provision was passed that allowed George and his wife, Isabelle, to own the land.

George Bush died in the early-1860s, but his family continued to have an impact from their homestead for years.

His son, Owen Bush, became a noted farmer who developed new strains of wheat and wheat-growing in the region.

And in fact, his wheat won awards at World's Fairs and expositions all over the country.

He also was elected to the early Washington State Legislature, the first black man to be elected.

He was a Republican in the House of Representatives.

And while there, he introduced legislation that created what is now Washington State University.

That's an amazing legacy.

But long before people showed up, the Northwest itself had endured many changes.

Our landscape is a record of massive floods, ice sheets coming and going, volcanic eruptions, and changing climate.

In short, it's a record of dramatic change, much of which could've been disastrous for humans.

Evidence of those changes is kept in our museums.

In the Provincial Museum in Victoria, BC, there's an exhibit about how climate change is impacting the environment.

At the New Burke Museum in Seattle, they've taken the long view.

You can look at the fossil record and see the climate changes here over millions of years, and it's pretty eye-opening.

(soft jungle music) The one thing people in the Pacific Northwest think they know is our climate.

But what a lotta people don't know is that the Pacific Northwest wasn't always the gray, rainy haven that we think of it today.

About 50 million years ago, palm trees thrived here.

So, imagine the Bellingham area, you're in a palm forest, something like you would find in Central America.

Think Costa Rica.

You move ahead maybe to 40 million years ago, you're getting ginkgo trees.

That's a climate similar to the Deep South.

In Central Oregon, they've actually found fossils of banana plants.

You think of the Pacific Northwest, you think of apples.

44 million years ago, it was bananas.

We're gonna take a great leap forward to 12,000 years ago.

As the glaciers are receding, you begin to find plants that are much more like some of the plants that we have today.

Conifer cones.

These aren't fossilized.

They were described to me as mummified.

But these are at least 12,000 years old or so.

Scientists are doing a lot of detective work using fossils to see what kinds of plants grew, what kinds of animals lived.

Human-caused climate change is happening very rapidly.

The more we understand about the past climate changes, even ones that occurred well before humans were around, will help us understand how the planet operates.

The Northwest did not become famous for its bananas, obviously.

But we're well-known for another slippery species that has survived extinction when it became one of America's consuming passions.

In the mid-19th century, America was experiencing an oyster mania.

Oysters were abundant back east and on the Gulf Coast.

People were eating oyster pies, roasted oysters, oyster stuffings, oysters of all kinds.

As people moved out west, particularly those who followed the Oregon Trail, they had to make do with a diet of hardtack and beans.

But when they got to the West Coast, they found something amazing that pleased their palates.

It was a native oyster, the only native oyster on the West Coast from Puget Sound to Baja California.

Of course, Native peoples on the coast had been eating Olympia oysters and clams and other shellfish for thousands of years and left the evidence in old repositories of dining debris we call shell middens.

When the settlers got to the coast, they found vast beds of the native oyster and they dubbed it Olympia, or Olys for short.

One of the greatest repositories was on the Pacific coast near Long Beach called Shoalwater Bay, now called Willapa Bay.

It was a calm-water estuary and it was a utopia for Olympia oysters.

Oysterville is there, and it came by its name very honestly.

Northwesterners not only ate Olympia oysters, they sold Olympia oysters.

The California gold rush was in full swing, and California could not meet the demand for oysters.

They shoveled them alive out of Shoalwater Bay.

They put them in barrels or sacks and moistened them so they would stay alive, put them on a ship, and sent them to San Francisco, where they were enormously popular.

In fact, we know that Mark Twain during his San Francisco period was a great Oly fan.

90% of the oysters consumed during the gold rush came from Washington Territory.

The oysters soon became ubiquitous in the west.

With the coming of the railroads, they could be shipped to places like Denver, Butte, Spokane.

Every saloon, high or low, fancy or not, served fresh oysters along with whiskey and beer.

We're still slurping Olympia oysters.

It's still a major seafood industry in the region.

Work is being done to expand the habitat for little Olympias, but there's concern about ocean acidification and its impact on shellfish.

Just because something's recovered doesn't mean it's saved permanently.

It takes ongoing work, persistence, and adaptation too, not unlike the airline industry, which is constantly trying to re-engineer to meet new challenges, like the persistence of a man in the arts who wanted to orchestrate change in Seattle.

And orchestrate he did with the help of a cure for constipation.

Really!

This vial contains Beecham's Little Pills.

They were invented in the early-19th century, when constipation was a huge problem.

And they purported to cure all kinds of things, including women's problems, headaches, and scurvy.

They were incredibly popular, and they made the founding family, the Beechams, wealthy.

And the heir to that fortune was a man who self-taught himself in classical music and took the money in his deep pockets to pay his own musicians, and he became one of the 20th century's most prominent conductors.

He was the legendary Sir Thomas Beecham.

He was the founder of the Royal Philharmonic, co-founded of the London Philharmonic, and he guest-conducted all over the world.

Beecham was an aristocrat.

He could do whatever he wanted.

(light orchestral music) In the early days of World War II, he was enticed to come to the small, remote port city of Seattle to take over the city's orchestra.

Beecham seemed to embrace the challenge of taking a small provincial orchestra and turning it into something world-class.

Beecham brought another thing to Seattle in addition to musical talent.

He brought attitude.

For Sir Thomas, attitude meant complete honesty.

He one time described a soprano's voice as like a cart rolling downhill with the brakes on.

And when he got to Seattle, he showed plenty of honesty.

During one of his early performances in the city, a photographer took a picture of Beecham while conducting, and the click of the camera drove the maestro crazy.

He stopped in mid-performance, scolded the photographer, and ordered him outta the hall, saying that what he had done was an insult to himself, the orchestra, and the performance.

Sir Thomas could dish out criticism.

He wasn't really good about taking it, but partly because he argued that the critics weren't smart enough to understand what they were listening to.

One time, he took recordings he made with the Seattle Symphony and recordings of other famous symphony orchestras and he played them for the critics behind a curtain.

They picked his recordings as the best, which he said was proof they didn't know what they were talking about.

One columnist wrote that Beecham entertained with baton and tongue.

But Beecham is most remembered for what he thought was a positive comment that turned into something else.

He was speaking to a group of boosters of the Seattle Symphony, and he was encouraging them to support the symphony and support the arts in Seattle.

Sir Thomas said if he were a member of this community, he would be tired of being considered an aesthetic dustbin.

Beecham meant it as an encouraging comment.

He meant it as something that sympathized with the cultural ambitions of the city.

It was taken very differently.

Headlines spread across the region that Beecham had called Seattle an aesthetic dustbin, a dustbin being the English term for garbage can.

The quote morphed and became even worse.

Aesthetic changed to cultural, and cultural dustbin has been something Seattle has been trying to live down ever since.

Sir Thomas was dogged in his pursuit of classical music.

He was determined to bring out the best in Seattle musicians.

He set high standards.

And while he left us with a dustbin legacy to overcome, Seattle has done that.

In fact, in the wake of the Boeing recession half a century ago, arts and culture flourished in Seattle.

Bumbershoot was launched.

The Seattle International Film Festival too.

Galleries and theater groups blossomed.

Artists had cheap housing and studio space.

And in 1974, the city's first Gay Pride Week was held.

Pride celebration has become an important event embraced by the city.

But it wasn't always easy for people with unconventional gender identities.

A trans youth cowboy from over a century ago helped make that point very clear.

Harry Allen was a cowboy.

He was a bartender.

He lived a rough-and-tumble life.

He concerted without laws.

He was arrested many times.

The interesting thing about Harry Allen and why he became so famous is that when he was born, his name was Nell Pickerell.

Today, we would recognize Harry Allen as a transgendered man.

He was assigned female gender at birth in the 1880s and raised in the rough-and-tumble of the frontier of the Pacific Northwest.

The first time Harry Allen appears as Nell Pickerell is in a newspaper account in 1900 of a town called Tunnel City, which newspapers called the wickedest place on Earth.

It was a boom town that sprang up in the Cascade Mountains near Stevens Pass when they were building the great Cascade Tunnel.

But Harry Allen was dressing as a man and participating in woman-on-woman boxing matches.

(bell ringing) It was a kind of "Fight Club" atmosphere in a town where anything went.

He took the name Harry Allen, sometimes called himself Harry Livingston, and moved to Seattle with his family.

He began to show up in newspaper accounts during that time.

In the late-19th century and early-20th century, particularly in the frontier period, it was not unusual for women to often dress as men, and this was done for a variety of reasons.

For some, it was self-protection.

Men outnumbered women about 14 to one.

In some cases, it was done because they could get men's jobs, which paid better.

Harry dressed as a man because he was a man, and the papers were at first charmed by this apparently switch of gender identities.

And in fact, he became kind of a celebrity through arrests, shenanigans, scandals.

But people also recognized that Harry Allen was a very charming, funny, vibrant person.

At the turn of the century, Seattle was a magnet for different kinds of people.

In fact, one of the terms for Seattle, it was said it was a hobo-hemia, full of alternative types of various kinds.

The antics of Harry Allen were considered at first kind of charming.

Harry Allen one time was arrested for riding down the streets of Seattle on a bicycle without using the handlebars.

(laughing) Harry Allen was accused of being irresponsible in the area of love.

He had a number of girlfriends who were alleged to have killed themselves after falling out with Harry Allen.

The newspapers implied that this was when women discovered that he was biologically female.

More likely, it had to do with simply a tragic ending to a love story.

But the papers feasted on the scandal.

The newspapers loved reporting Harry Allen's antics.

They loved stories of fallen women even more.

Harry became a target for the police.

In 1907, Seattle was getting less and less tolerant as the city became more middle-class.

A law was passed that outlawed women from wearing men's pants and redefined vagrancy to basically mean anything the police wanted it to mean.

Harry Allen was hassled more, began traveling more around the region, was arrested in Tacoma, Spokane, Ritzville, Yakima.

Eventually, Harry went to Portland, and he took a woman he described as his wife.

He was arrested in Portland for violating the Mann Act, which was bringing a woman across a state line for immoral purposes.

His wife was alleged to be a common prostitute.

The judge found him innocent because he was biologically female and a female couldn't commit a crime under the Mann Act.

But he found him guilty of vagrancy because it was illegal for a woman to wear man's pants.

Imagine the grit and determination it took for Harry Allen in an era that had no words for it.

A century later, we can take inspiration from him.

While Seattle entered the jet age with Boeing, the Boeing recession of the late-1960s and '70s came at a time when people were beginning to question technological progress.

Boeing planned to build a supersonic transport like the Concorde, the SST, but funding was cut.

People questioned the environmental impacts as well as spending priorities.

Why were we going to the moon when there was so much need here on Earth?

Those are questions we still debate today.

Sometimes, stopping and thinking about what constitutes progress is important, and those conversations can literally change the way a city looks, like stopping a highway from going through your living room.

Buckle up!

(car horns honking) In the 1950s and '60s, Seattle's future was seen as a city of highways.

Planners wanted to put highways all over town.

We put I-5 through downtown, but they also envisioned a city circled with freeways and expressways north, south, east, and west.

And one of the most notorious of those was called the RH Thompson Expressway.

The Thompson was named for the famed city engineer who reshaped Seattle.

He was responsible for many of the regrades that we underwent.

The RH Thompson Expressway was gonna run north-south in East Seattle.

It was gonna run from Ravenna through the arboretum in Montlake, then down to the Rainier Valley in the Central area.

Originally, voters approved the idea, but skepticism began to build as people gained environmental consciousness in the 1960s and '70s.

And many people were also unhappy with the results of what happened when I-5 split the city in two.

The experience with I-5 saw thousands of homes torn down and neighborhoods split in half.

The response to that was to take a second look at the kind of freeway mania that was shaping Seattle.

A coalition formed of people who were skeptical about the benefits of freeways, environmentalists, and people whose neighborhoods would be damaged by the RH Thompson.

They included people from places like Ravenna and Montlake, the University of Washington, and they even included Central-area groups like the Black Panthers.

They referred to the freeways as concrete dragons, and their job was to slay them, and they literally blocked bulldozers the day construction was to begin.

By the 1970s, grassroots political activism was working in Seattle, both in the area of civil rights and in causes like saving the Pike Place Market.

The environmental consciousness had been raised.

Public opinion changed about the RH Thompson.

People decided it was a bad idea.

And in 1972, voters voted it down.

When the Evergreen Point Bridge, now the 520 Bridge, was built in the early-1960s, ramps to the proposed RH Thompson were built.

Once the project was stopped, the ramps stayed in place and thus became the ramps to nowhere.

The on-ramps and off-ramps and overpasses stood unconnected like ancient ruins, a folly in a park.

Over the years, people got used to them and in fact put them to use.

(water splashing) Instead of carrying commuters, the ramps to nowhere serviced swimmers who would jump off into the lake and sunbathers.

Visitors to the arboretum would wander and see these remnants of the freeway and wondered why it stopped in midair.

The unfinished highway created a kind of informal monument to citizen activism.

Here was a place where people said no and stopped a freeway in its tracks.

The decade of activism and grassroots creativity during and following the Boeing recession created the modern Seattle we know: an arts city, not a dustbin; a city with a green conscience; a city where new innovative parks like Gas Works Park and Freeway Park and trails like the Burke-Gilman were more exciting than more freeways.

It also saw the birth of Starbucks and the arrival of Microsoft, which launched new, caffeinated ways of working.

Setbacks and adversity have not held us back from moving forward.

History and discovering our stories, your stories, reminds us of that daily.

Seattle did not turn out the lights during the Boeing recession.

Instead, creative light bulbs turned on.

Remembering that is helpful as we figure out how to recover from the challenges of today.

I think it's time to check out these planes.

There's so many different kinds of aircraft.

There's the famous six-engine B-47.

And right across the way, the Douglas DC-2, very rare plane.

They say it's still flyable.