THE PORT OF MISSING MEN: BILLY GOHL, LABOR, AND BRUTAL TIMES IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST by Aaron Goings

Abstract

462 OHQ vol. 121, no. 4 provides an overview of the women’s community and family of origin, background on their Euro-American husbands, the historical circumstances that brought the couples together, and the trajectory of their lives and those of their spouses and children into the early twentieth century. These biographies make for interesting reading because the author has woven together multifold strands of a fragmentary source base that allows her to reconsider the history of Whatcom County from the perspective of Indian women who, within a swirl of larger historical events, were actively engaged in creating families and communities across cultural lines. These biographies are interesting and enlightening; however, they do always not make for easy reading. The eight women confronted a range of hardships and challenges during their lifetime, including separations from their families of origin and children, intimate partner and organized settler violence, economic distress and abandonment, the progressive dispossession and administrative assault on Coast Salish communities initiated with the Point Elliot Treaty (1855), and the incredible ripple effects of the Fraser River Gold Rush (1858). Despite such countervailing winds, these Native women demonstrated fortitude and perseverance as well as economic foresight and entrepreneurialism. The women from Coast Salish communities in the region harnessed the political acumen and strategic thinking of their elders to advance the interests of their bicultural families and Native communities in Whatcom County, all in the face of settler efforts to marginalize both groups. Although Peace Weavers and Interwoven Lives are narrative histories less engaged with historiographical currents in gender history, Indigenous history, and settler colonial studies, they add fascinating and valuable insights to the historical record. For example, the story of Mrs. George Pickett provides a fuller picture of the complex, sometimes troubled life of George E. Pickett prior to his service in the Civil War and the Battle of Gettysburg (1863). It also reveals the Haida woman’s legacy in the career of her son, James Tilton Pickett, who became a respected commercial artist in Portland, Oregon , prior to his death in 1889 at age thirty-one. These two volumes will be useful resources for general readers and local residents, college students, and researchers and scholars seeking fine-grained details on a crucial period in Pacific Northwest history. Noteworthy, too, is Wellman’s re-examination of Phoebe Goodell Judson’s A Pioneer’s Search for an Ideal Home (1925), and Judson’s sleight of hand in representing the experience of Indigenous women in Puget Sound. For comparative views, Wellman’s book can be paired with Sue Armitage’s Shaping the Public Good: Women Making History in the Pacific Northwest (2015) and Katrina Jagodinsky ’s Legal Codes and Talking Trees: Indigenous Women’s Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854–1946 (2016). In sum, Wellman has ably demonstrated the critical importance of biographical studies. She has placed Native women at the center of Whatcom County history as well as that of Washington State and the Pacific Northwest. These women’s biographies were actively distorted and suppressed by the structures of settler colonialism. Wellman has countered this “silencing the past” (in the words of Michel-Rolph Trouillot) and helped reweave their stories and their contributions into the larger public memory. Melinda Marie Jetté Franklin Pierce University THE PORT OF MISSING MEN: BILLY GOHL, LABOR, AND BRUTAL TIMES IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST by Aaron Goings University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2020. Illustrations, photographs. 296 pages. $29.95 cloth. In 2019, crime writer C.J. March published a popular history with the eye-catching title, The Ghoul of Grays Harbor. Who was the ghoul of 463 Reviews Grays Harbor? The answer was well known to visitors and residents of this coastal port on the Olympia peninsula. Aaron Goings, who grew up in the Grays Harbor city of Aberdeen, had imbibed the story of this notorious serial killer as part of the ambiance of his hometown. Now, Goings has written an engaging and deeply researched book that conclusively lays the blame on a very different killer. In looking for the real killer, The Port of Missing Men takes readers into Grays Harbor’s saloons and boarding houses, its fraternal lodges, union halls, city...