Peter Burnett, Oregon pioneer and governor of California, had one of the most impressive resumes of any early leaders in the American West, yet failed at most of his pursuits. A former slaveholder, he could never seem to get beyond his single-minded goal of banning black people and other minorities from the West.

In 1887, more than thirty Chinese gold miners were massacred on the Oregon side of Hells Canyon, the deepest canyon in North America. Massacred for Gold, the first authoritative account of the unsolved crime, unearths the evidence that points to an improbable gang of rustlers and schoolboys, one only fifteen, as the killers.
The crime was discovered weeks after it happened, but no charges were brought for nearly a year, when gang member Frank Vaughan, son of a well-known settler family, confessed and turned stateas evidence. Six men and boys, all from northeastern Oregonas remote Wallowa county, were chargedabut three fled, and the others were found innocent by a jury that a witness admitted had little interest in convicting anyone. A cover-up followed, and the crime was all but forgotten for the next one hundred years, until a county clerk in Wallowa County found hidden records in an unused safe.
Massacred for Gold traces the authoras long personal journey to expose details of the massacre and its aftermath and to understand how one of the worst of the many crimes committed by whites against Chinese laborers in the American West was for so long lost to history.

Beneath the 24/7 national news cycle and argument over 'fake news,' there is a layer of journalism that communities absolutely depend upon. Grit and Ink offers a rare look inside the financial struggles and family dynamic that has kept a Pacific Northwest publishing group alive for more than a century. The newspapers of the Aldrich-Forrester-Bedford-Brown family depict the histories of towns like Pendleton, Astoria, John Day, Enterprise, and Long Beach, Washington. Written by noted historian William Willingham, Grit and Ink describes threats presented by the Ku Klux Klan, the Great Astoria Fire of 1923, the Great Depression, the Aryan Nation, the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation, the Digital Revolution, and more.