Jack Nisbet’s “A Pretty Lively Shock” illustrates the rich possibilities of a geospatial history that takes seriously the diverse voices of Cascadia’s residents--native and non-native, settler and scientist, rural and town-based, female and male. In reflecting upon that which binds together these heterogeneous accounts of the 1872 Chelan earthquake, geologist Steve Box remarks that they all took place on “the same earth.” What does it means to write a history of “the same earth” in Washington Territory, given that understandings of the underlying geophysical dynamics varied dramatically for the various human participants in the story? And how can new multimedia technologies deepen our appreciation of this enduring paradox: the same earth convulses under us all, yet human encounters with those physical shocks are organized by variable convulsions in the body politic, embedded in tangled histories of economy, ideas, and colonial relations.
To grasp these different histories of a common landscape, Nisbet takes us on a journey across space and time, digging up old newspapers and letters, recovering with care and imagination the voices of long-lost EuroAmerican settlers; walking and gazing intently upon the convoluted terrain; listening with patience and attentiveness to indigenous historians and oral story-tellers; and consulting with earth scientists. He has created a compelling conversation among all these disparate voices. As Jack’s collaborators, we at Cascadia Chronicle have tried to help bring this conversation to life through new multimedia technologies--allowing readers to scroll through the author’s prose while modulating between the Olympian heights of GoogleEarth flyovers and the weathered pages of old territorial maps, sliding from scientific diagrams to sepia-toned photographs. All reading is an act of journeying; we have tried through the scrolling screen to give visible correlatives to the traveling mind’s eye inspired by Jack Nisbet’s prose.
In so doing, we have tried to offer an object lesson on the social and cultural dimensions of frontier zones such as Cascadia. A frontier is a place where difference constantly threatens to dissolve or fall apart, even as varied parties attempt to enforce ever harder lines of difference, on the putative grounds of race, ethnicity, gender or class. This was surely the case for inner Washington territory a decade and a half before before statehood. Across this volatile, intermediate social space, indigenous and EuroAmerican residents struggled to make sense of a radically transforming social world, in which so many old certainties were sliding sideways and toppling away. The 1872 convulsions of the earth, generated by the dynamic subterranean geological frontier between tectonic zones, have come, for many, to evoke broader economic, political and cultural shocks across the frontier of the native and non-native Northwest. Paradoxically, paying close attention to the history of our restless and fractured earth, as experienced and visualized across the whole spectrum of the frontier’s human populations, allows us to glimpse a truly unified history of the Columbia plateau.
Mark Auslander, co-editor, Cascadia Chronicle (February 2014)