she was very much involved in campaigning for william jennings bryan. she was actually the first woman in 1912, a woman delegate to the national democratic congress she's very much part of the larger picture of what's happening in the early 20th century in the nation, and she also was a representative of the women in spokane. >> and stand in front of the bridge avenue spokane washington as we continue our look at the cities literary scene. we're here collecting the stories about people and its relationship to the landscape to the pacific northwest. so this is the spokane river coming in from east. it's about a week because the

snowmelt issues about because because it's warming up and you can see out at the end of the last ice age, about 14-20,000 years ago these huge floods came in the stretching and lay down these flood terraces and lay down these grapples that are great reds for salmon and trout. there's about 8000 years of archaeology on this area right here with really fine implements from different kinds of work stoned that come from far away and lots of fish bones and mammal bones and just a general good scene that lasted here and kill for traders came in the 1800s and went on for fun. the name of this book is "ancient places" and what i was to do was write a book about changes. right here at the creek all these different changes took place, some kind to find stories that really circle around the

cultural, social, cosmic, any content i could think of, take scale, little scale. the one that works for this area right here happens around 1900 1900-1910, i kid comes as a minor to this area. there are flooding into this if them all of the places. lots of canadians came here. he's got some talent in math and it becomes the surveyor up in stevens can which is the county north of here. there's all these mines going in any surveys and mine he rode in on the spokane indian reservation and it goes through the home of this really respected leader named william three mounds the younger and is wife, and he becomes buddies with them on some level. we don't know much, and he gets a pair of beautiful moccasins that she made, and he gets what he described as an old cupid

shaped bow that william three mounds the younger had inherited from his father, the elder. this guys name is many company collects a lot of other artifacts, and he is just worth getting stuff and he sort of doing his surveys. but what he does not know and makes the story for me is that william three mountain the younger father is this legendary figure who had, the hea headmana band that ledger at the confluence of hangman creek and spokane river. the fact that these plants are still here that william three mountains pick him his family would affect them, service berries for food, there's something about that that is both severe change, cataclysmic change, but also a constant that is the kind of story i tried to tell in this "ancient places" book. so that's the small changes.

so the world that i living in a kind right in is the world between the rocky mountains and the cascade which is a big anger spokane is right in the middle of a they form a triangle and wide net as you get into the great basin but that's my beat is the interior, the intermountain west. it has a bunch of different names that don't describe it very well. there's lots of large geologic events. in the place where we are 15-20 million years ago these huge flows came up from the south, thousands of feet thick eventually and created these cliffs and powell said that i'm sure some member of your crew is out filming right now. they stop and then 15,000 years ago these floods came in and worked the edges of them. there's older metamorphic rock to the north on the other side of the river. there's volcanic rock to the south. the floodwaters were those and

opened them up and meet all these great geologic features to look at. that's a huge visual thinking if you drive around in this part, that's what you see. you can't really talk about the stories in the time talk but without having the floods wash to every story. if you can crank it back, way back, there's an indian ocean to the reason all the samples were at the edge of an inland sea at the edge of the continent, much longer time ago, hundreds of millions of years ago. we can't understand five generations ago. tribal people can. travel people most of them can understand five and some ten generations ago. name their families out. but to go 10,000 years ago, nobody can understand that. to go 10 million years ago and 100 million to go and a building years ago it impossible and that's why there's a meteorite story in here that gets a lot of attention because it just blanks people out. they can't comprehend that

large-scale of time. that's what i'm trying to do a lot of the time is just a race any kind of time perspective. -- erase pick the first story in a book, the leadoff story is david thompson who's in the 1780s come quite a long the gentleman's time has expired. ago as a man out in the north country on his way here. but he's way far north in the winter, it's dark and he sees what he thinks is a meteorite come some kind of visual phenomena, some kind of astronomical phenomenon and he cannot figure out. he's a scientifically minded guy. he thinks about it, and he gets a fabulous description of what we think is probably swap gas bubbles bubbling out of this marsh where he is, but the physics of that time don't give him the words to understand the scale so he keeps trying to fool with what it is, how does it work. then he does the same thing with northern lights which are on the aurora borealis is spectacular

there and it works for another kind of scale, like the cosmological skill. he's always thinking about that, how has this been shaped? how was the earth made? he goes and asks tribal people how did you come here? how was your country made? how was your landscape for the? what happens when you die? david thompson is great for asking those large-scale questions, and the tribes have these great interest. so for aurora borealis which was just your last week and i'm sorry you missed it, he tries to do with the physics of that time which doesn't do a good job of explaining it. he talks to others and they say these are the dancers of our dear departed elders and they are dancing to the free spirits of the universe. then he does write anymore about it. he thinks that's good enough. so scale is what you make of it in your head. explaining the world is how you make it in your head, and that's a big part of the stories as i

could tell, i focus on some people thinks they haven't figured out and they don't have it figured out. there's always a scale larger than they can understand, there still is. there always will be. and again in these ancient places, stories, they don't come to need in thinks. there's no such thing. to ask of the tribes respond, they are devastated, traumatized. they still are and they're trying to come out of it. a lot of them are astonishing resilient people, and i've been made toward around by several of them who i've been friends with for a long time, and they're constantly telling me look, you don't understand. you don't have any say in this. you are doing a terrible job of what you're doing. but if you're going to do you better do a better job. you better stick with it and do it. you've been in a so long you can't quit now. they have these mixed messages, but yet in total that makes sense. i can't quit.

i've got to really understand it and try to live with it and understand it. they've been a huge help in answering your question which is unanswerable. many of the stories i had fooled with overtime. i talked, might indicate something i would go back and interview picky. i just never in status and within. i've never done good enough for him to my guess is one way to say. i didn't feel like i done well enough. i let them sit for five and ten and 15 years may in some cases, and then went back and if it do get in the way that i could se, that i couldn't see before because i understand scale better now than it did when i was 20 years younger. that might be one way to think of it but again it's just where you are at that particular time. a most interesting thing was that i was writing the book the pieces were together by themselves and in order that made it makes sense to me. but what i realize now is that our new elements in his social dynamic and often they are spanish and russian.

those are the slavic people are the biggest minority in spokane. so the last essay in the book is about ice-skating on a part in your degree weather on a pretty big lake and the wind is blowing. there is a russian other ice fishing, and i can't talk to them. it happened. but he couldn't talk to him because he didn't speak english. i really like what i got out of it. i know he didn't do anything out of it but i liked what it leads me to go next. when you talk to a lot of people in town, how can we incorporate latinos, who we incorporate the slavic minority into this world that is going to be in the next two centuries, that's going to be here, how do we deal with it, bring the men? they have these real strong cultures on their own. that's what happened in the first trade. you maintain an identity with the strong culture and helps in the long run. when you are writer, you sit down and write the book. for me anyway i don't have that

much control over what comes out. i figure it out vote and after people come after talking to people, after spin out a while. this ancient places book has been out a while, i realized i was drawn to these places. they pulled me in by the power, by the nature of what they are and how they worked over time. all i want to do is keep going back to the over and over and listen to them, see what i can get from them. the lesson is that everybody gets something different from them and the same person get something different from them if they are listening, if they're paying attention each time they go back. it is in lusk that the story never in santa keeps changing as you circle back around. these are nonfiction essays or stories, but they really had more into the story world and they are funny and fun pic. the people in the net senses of humor.

you can never predict what action is going. that nonfiction as just as like as fiction is and i like that. i want the world to be unpredictable and do not know what's happening tomorrow and to overwhelm us with these kinds of events. >> next up from spokane washington jerrelene williamson shares stories of the black families arrived in spokane in 1899. >> my great grandfather and my grandfather, he was a boy at the time, were recruited spartan virginia two, on a train up to rosalind washington and they were to break a coal strike but they didn't know they were breaking coal strike. the father just coming for jobs. so that really caused a big furor at that time. and there were several, it was a lot