47 Quotes by Timothy Egan

The villainous sun and the starved bank did not seem related – yet.

The Columbia River Bar has swallowed more ships, about 2,100 at last count, than any other location on the Pacific north of Mexico.

Upshaw – Apsaroke, 1905. Curtis’s friend and interpreter Alexander Upshaw, “perfectly educated and absolutely uncivilized,” as Curtis said of him, had trouble shuttling between two worlds. He chose to pose in the clothes of his ancestors.

The tribes may have been numerous, but the overall population was plummeting. When the results of the 1900 census were published, the government counted only 237,000 Indians in a country of 76 million people. This was the lowest number ever, scholars and Indian authorities said, down from perhaps as many as 10 million at the time of white contact in 1492.

Much of Texas took its prohibition seriously. Not Dalhart. It took its whiskey seriously, in part because some of the finest corn liquor in America was coming out of the High Plains.

Rioting over food: how could this be? Here was all this grain, food enough to feed half the world, sitting in piles at the train station, going to waste. Something was out of balance.

The problem with history was that it was written by the survivors, and they usually wrote in the sunshine on harvest day, from victory stands.

A decent man would stand out like a cactus on an ice floe.

Their humanity has been forgotten,” Grinnell said of the predominant way most outsiders looked at Indians – as either savages or victims.