"The story of the land in the Northwest flows from the cataclysmic ice-age floods. So it only follows that the stories of the people in this terrain are inextricably linked to the aftereffects of that great deluge. These are the genesis stories of a region. Included are the controversy over the provenance and ownership of a meteor that fell to earth in rural Oregon; the mystery of the aurora borealis as observed by 18th-century explorer David Thompson; the town in the northeastern Washington that drew immigrant artisans from Italy because of its deposits of terra cotta clay; and a recounting of the great floods of 15,000 years ago that shaped the land of what is now Washington, Oregon, and Idaho"--