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Wildmen, Wobblies & Whistle Punks: Stewart Holbrook's Lowbrow Northwest
Stewart Holbrook — high-school dropout, logger, journalist, storyteller, and historian — was one of the best-loved figures in the Pacific Northwest during the two decades preceding his death in 1964. This anthology collects two dozen of his best pieces about his adopted home, the Pacific Northwest.
Holbrook believed in "lowbrow or non-stuffed shirt history." Holbrook's lowbrow Northwest ranges from British Columbia logging camps to Oregon ranches, and is peopled with fascinating characters like Liverpool Liz of the old Portland waterfront, the over-sexed prophet Joshua II of the Church of the Brides of Christ in Corvallis, and Arthur Boose, the last Wobbly paper boy. Here are stories of forgotten scandals and crimes, forest fires, floods, and other catastrophes, stories of workers, underdogs, scoundrels, dreamers, and fanatics, stories that bring the past to life.
Holbrook believed in "lowbrow or non-stuffed shirt history." Holbrook's lowbrow Northwest ranges from British Columbia logging camps to Oregon ranches, and is peopled with fascinating characters like Liverpool Liz of the old Portland waterfront, the over-sexed prophet Joshua II of the Church of the Brides of Christ in Corvallis, and Arthur Boose, the last Wobbly paper boy. Here are stories of forgotten scandals and crimes, forest fires, floods, and other catastrophes, stories of workers, underdogs, scoundrels, dreamers, and fanatics, stories that bring the past to life.
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
About the author
Stewart H. Holbrook
65 books10 followersStewart Hall Holbrook (1893 - 1964) was an American lumberjack, writer, and popular historian. His writings focused on what he called the "Far Corner" - Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. A self-proclaimed "low-brow" historian, his topics included Ethan Allen, the railroads, the timber industry, the Wobblies, and eccentrics of the Pacific Northwest.
He wrote for The Oregonian for over thirty years, and authored dozens of books. He also produced a number of paintings under the pseudonym of "Mr. Otis."
He wrote for The Oregonian for over thirty years, and authored dozens of books. He also produced a number of paintings under the pseudonym of "Mr. Otis."
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
September 17, 2007
Unfairly forgotten primo Northwest writer who has an unsparing eye and a sensitive BS detector. Funny, exciting, poignant and highly recommended, especially if you live in the Pacific Northwest. Loggers and anarchists, murderers and crazies, all here, all beautifully explicated.
March 28, 2010
the great stewart holbrook was a storytelling titan and remains one of the most important writers in pacific northwest history. wildmen, wobblies & whistle punks is a career-spanning collection of over two dozen pieces set mostly in holbrook's beloved oregon. comfortable writing about nearly anything, his true tales often dealt with the fantastic, the forgotten, and the forlorn. like h.l. mencken, his contemporary and friend, holbrook stood up for the marginalized working man and exposed the hypocrisies of the ruling classes. holbrook could seemingly make any topic interesting with his easy blend of humor, character, and lively prose. wildmen, wobblies & whistle punks contains some truly unbelievable stories about the tillamook burn (355,000 acres of old growth forest fire), the 1942 aerial bombing of brookings, oregon by the japanese, the 1903 heppner flood (deadliest natural disaster in state history), and the late nineteenth century practice of "crimping" drunken patrons from portland saloons. replete with a dizzying and rugged array of sensational characters including railroad moguls, anarchists, murderers, tavern owners, lumberjacks, communists, robber barons, prophets, cattle kings, outlaws, and prostitutes, this collection will intrigue anyone with even the remotest interest in the pacific northwest or neglected american history.
yet the supporters of this and of other myths are not to be charged with fabricating. they are merely poets, poets seeking to fasten a measure of that mysterious thing we call art to an event or a thing that is graceless without it.
yet the supporters of this and of other myths are not to be charged with fabricating. they are merely poets, poets seeking to fasten a measure of that mysterious thing we call art to an event or a thing that is graceless without it.
February 24, 2015
Love. Love. Love. Obsessed, even.
Holbrook's storytelling takes the reader from the three madams of Portland's brothels, through the fear and realities of entire towns' destruction in the wake of fire and flood all the way to the tales of lumberjacks, the front-runner of civilization as European populations spread west.
I want to get a Holbrooks tattoo. That is how in love I am with this collection and his style.Here is one of his stories for your reading pleasure: http://theforestandthesea.wordpress.c...
Holbrook's storytelling takes the reader from the three madams of Portland's brothels, through the fear and realities of entire towns' destruction in the wake of fire and flood all the way to the tales of lumberjacks, the front-runner of civilization as European populations spread west.
I want to get a Holbrooks tattoo. That is how in love I am with this collection and his style.Here is one of his stories for your reading pleasure: http://theforestandthesea.wordpress.c...
May 29, 2020
This book is a total gem. Can't recommend it highly enough for those who live in the Pacific Northwest and who want a fun and rapid-fire way to acquaint themselves with some of the weirder (and in some cases radical) episodes in the history of their region, in writing covering the late 19th and early 20th century. According to the introduction by one Brian Booth, when Stewart Holbrook, the author of these few dozen brief and fascinating pieces, passed away in the mid-1960's as an old man, he had achieved a minor literary celebrity nationwide and was a widely-loved popular historian of the northwest. It's easy to see why. No footnotes or stuffy language make this book pass effortlessly, like snippets of so many dreams recounted by a very literate uncle with a soft spot for eccentrics and anarchists. I found myself talking to my housemate consistently about several pieces in the anthology. Also, I often looked up wikipedia pages and random history sites to confirm the details related by Holbrook (who mostly was telling the truth but occasionally embellishes in the tradition of folklore and oral culture) and thusly found some worthwhile tellings of the same events with different details or emphases. In tandem, my many brief readings gave a me a sense of a deeper dive or more well-rounded view of the event in question. Highlights for me included learning about John Tornow (the Wild Man of Wynoochee), the freaky religious sex cult that was based in Corvallis at the turn of the century (whose leader claimed responsibility for the 1906 earthquake that levelled San Franciciso) and much more, including three different pieces explicity about anarchists: one about the experimental commune on Puget Sound at Home, Washington, one about the OG Wobbly involvement in the logging industries of the West (their classic turf), and the concluding piece of the book about the last Wobbly paper-seller in Portland, Arthur Boose, converted anarchism as a very young man by the oratory of none other than Johann Most! I ate this shit with a spoon.
January 27, 2025
"Wildmen, Wobblies, and Whistle Punks", a collection of publications by Stewart Holbrook, cobbled together by Brian Booth, is a valuable piece of Northwest history, even if a few pages smell faintly of Chinook that’s been left out for too long.
The intro by this dude Brian Booth is detrimental to the narrative as a whole. Booth starts off the 40 page intro, that’s almost a 6th of the book mind you, by blaming pretentious academics for Holbrook, a once famous historian and journalist in the Northwest, falling into anonymity.
“How can scholars be expected to take seriously a historian who did not like footnotes and rarely used them… and perhaps worst of all, wound up with books on the best-seller lists? Schools and colleges, which today use bland history texts that are carefully written to avoid offending any group, have no use for an author who wrote fondly of loggers… and treated subjects from religion to the pioneers with irreverence.”
Wow Brian, great way to engross the reader, attack an education, and start the intro by apologizing for an author who doesn’t require an apology in the first place. Holbrook was a journalist and a product of his times. As long as you read this book with those things in mind, his writing is engaging and legitimate in its journalistic value. Holbrook is, in his own words, “seeking to fasten a measure of that mysterious thing we call art to an event or thing that is graceless without it.” Brian Booth’s intro makes the reader immediately skeptical of all of Holbrooks writing, and adds a certain “holier than thou” quality to it, to the detriment of the book as a whole.
What’s more, Holbrook himself calls attention to his writing being suspect. His writing is “my own opinions, prejudices, and fallacies.” It is all suspect without footnotes or the citing of his sources. We know from the exhausting intro that he frequented libraries while writing his publications. As you sift through the romanticism and hearsay of Holbrook’s publications, you find gold nuggets of Pacific Northwest history. Leave it at that.
And that is my only issue with this book, aside from the intro. Holbrooks romanticism and embellishments were too rich for me at times. His love letters to long gone saloons, which are one consistent type of story big Brian saw fit to include in this anthology, are nostalgic, romanticized, and in one particular case, seem fabricated.
In two different publications, "The Three Sirens of Portland", and "Saloon in the Timber", Holbrook tells us of a common practice in logging communities of the times wherein the owner of the local bar or saloon acts as a banker for loggers, who do not trust banks. Fred Hewlett of Saloon in the Timber is said to have kept a “big safe, which had a nice oil painting of Niagara Falls on its doors.” Likewise, “Liverpool Liz” of Three Sirens of Portland, “had an enormous safe – with an oil painting of Niagara Falls on the outside door-”. After I caught this, and after Booth’s nauseating intro, it just made all of Holbrook’s writing feel a bit more suspect. Maybe it was common to keep oil paintings of Niagara Falls on safe doors in the Pacific Northwest, feel free to correct me if that’s the case.
That being said, Holbrook’s coverage of homicide or manhunts, which are another common inclusion in this anthology, are riveting and as far as I can tell, well researched and factual.
All in all, if you grew up in Washington, Oregon, BC, or Idaho, this book is worth a read if you’re interested in political, economic, and social history of the area, and don’t mind the jaunty medium its told in. Let Stewart do his own talking BRIAN.
The intro by this dude Brian Booth is detrimental to the narrative as a whole. Booth starts off the 40 page intro, that’s almost a 6th of the book mind you, by blaming pretentious academics for Holbrook, a once famous historian and journalist in the Northwest, falling into anonymity.
“How can scholars be expected to take seriously a historian who did not like footnotes and rarely used them… and perhaps worst of all, wound up with books on the best-seller lists? Schools and colleges, which today use bland history texts that are carefully written to avoid offending any group, have no use for an author who wrote fondly of loggers… and treated subjects from religion to the pioneers with irreverence.”
Wow Brian, great way to engross the reader, attack an education, and start the intro by apologizing for an author who doesn’t require an apology in the first place. Holbrook was a journalist and a product of his times. As long as you read this book with those things in mind, his writing is engaging and legitimate in its journalistic value. Holbrook is, in his own words, “seeking to fasten a measure of that mysterious thing we call art to an event or thing that is graceless without it.” Brian Booth’s intro makes the reader immediately skeptical of all of Holbrooks writing, and adds a certain “holier than thou” quality to it, to the detriment of the book as a whole.
What’s more, Holbrook himself calls attention to his writing being suspect. His writing is “my own opinions, prejudices, and fallacies.” It is all suspect without footnotes or the citing of his sources. We know from the exhausting intro that he frequented libraries while writing his publications. As you sift through the romanticism and hearsay of Holbrook’s publications, you find gold nuggets of Pacific Northwest history. Leave it at that.
And that is my only issue with this book, aside from the intro. Holbrooks romanticism and embellishments were too rich for me at times. His love letters to long gone saloons, which are one consistent type of story big Brian saw fit to include in this anthology, are nostalgic, romanticized, and in one particular case, seem fabricated.
In two different publications, "The Three Sirens of Portland", and "Saloon in the Timber", Holbrook tells us of a common practice in logging communities of the times wherein the owner of the local bar or saloon acts as a banker for loggers, who do not trust banks. Fred Hewlett of Saloon in the Timber is said to have kept a “big safe, which had a nice oil painting of Niagara Falls on its doors.” Likewise, “Liverpool Liz” of Three Sirens of Portland, “had an enormous safe – with an oil painting of Niagara Falls on the outside door-”. After I caught this, and after Booth’s nauseating intro, it just made all of Holbrook’s writing feel a bit more suspect. Maybe it was common to keep oil paintings of Niagara Falls on safe doors in the Pacific Northwest, feel free to correct me if that’s the case.
That being said, Holbrook’s coverage of homicide or manhunts, which are another common inclusion in this anthology, are riveting and as far as I can tell, well researched and factual.
All in all, if you grew up in Washington, Oregon, BC, or Idaho, this book is worth a read if you’re interested in political, economic, and social history of the area, and don’t mind the jaunty medium its told in. Let Stewart do his own talking BRIAN.
July 21, 2019
This book is close to five stars for me. (I am behind on my reviewing; I finished it a couple of months ago, and I couldn't stop telling people about it.)
I've known about Holbrook for a long time, but had never read him. Various conceptions of the Northwest -- lumberjacks, logging camps, wild west Portland -- come from Holbrook, who wrote for many publications such as The American Mercury, Century Magazine, and The New Yorker in the 1930s-50s (primarily). This collection includes various bits of history, profiles of people and places, and true crime stories. Holbrook is a humorous and colorful storyteller, but also captures the pathos of calamity. He provides several harrowing accounts of fires and one devastating flash flood (more than 200 killed in minutes in an Oregon town of 1,100, in 1903). I would go so far as to call this book essential (and highly rewarding) reading for anyone interested in the history and culture of the Northwest.
I've known about Holbrook for a long time, but had never read him. Various conceptions of the Northwest -- lumberjacks, logging camps, wild west Portland -- come from Holbrook, who wrote for many publications such as The American Mercury, Century Magazine, and The New Yorker in the 1930s-50s (primarily). This collection includes various bits of history, profiles of people and places, and true crime stories. Holbrook is a humorous and colorful storyteller, but also captures the pathos of calamity. He provides several harrowing accounts of fires and one devastating flash flood (more than 200 killed in minutes in an Oregon town of 1,100, in 1903). I would go so far as to call this book essential (and highly rewarding) reading for anyone interested in the history and culture of the Northwest.
July 6, 2018
What a read! Wow! Old school regional journalism by and about kooky characters is really all it claims. This was a great introduction to a historic journalist, and though in these pieces he does not give the most complex theses, he paints an accurate (but wild) show of events from the 1840s-1940s in the Pacific Northwest (and a bit of his native Maine, I think). I will definitely keep reading his work, especially since I already had some of his pieces (like the one about mackinaws) on my list. 9/10, this book brought me into the snuff-pipe rain-soaked fire-breathing world of the Willamette watershed and surroundings and kept me there for weeks.
September 29, 2017
I so enjoyed this book, not only for the topics of life in logging camps, bars in Portland, madams and Wobblies, but a whole lot of stories inbetween. I loved Holbrook's writing - so concise and entertaining. I highly recommend this book.
March 25, 2025
An Oregon classic.
We've lost something with the disappearance of large market magazines with literary bents.
We've lost something with the disappearance of large market magazines with literary bents.
May 28, 2025
I enjoyed the telling of stories of lesser known people of the northwest. Many of the stories ended on a whimper instead of a bang but I guess they can’t all be bangs.
February 18, 2017
Would love to find more literature on the early days of Pacific Northwest logging towns and communities. This book has definitely piqued my interest!
November 19, 2007
A wonderful collection of stories about the Northwest, particularly Portland, OR. The city has history and it is a sordid one. If you have been to the city then read this and learn some storied about the places that you have been. Or, just read it to get a peek into the auspicious character of Holbrook.
August 6, 2015
This book was great! Holbrook captures 'slice of life' stories with great reverence towards the characters and places contained in them. This book almost feels like a PNW proto version of Howard Zinn's "A People's History." This is a book that I will want to read again so I can learn to retell some of the stories while sitting around campfires or walking through tall stands of Doug Fir trees.
July 24, 2008
Stewart Holbrook died in Portland in 1964, having become America's foremost chronicler of and commentator on the Pacific Northwest. He was a drunk, a painter, a self-promoting prankster, and above all, a profiteer.
August 18, 2012
This book is amazing. It's strange that the editor is given author credit on this. Stewart Holbrook wrote all the parts worth reading in this book. Go read it. Now.
July 5, 2015
Interesting
December 13, 2011
One of the best books I've read in a long time.
May 2, 2017
Great entertainment for all, not just the history buffs, nor just for those who live in the northwest, where most of the stories centralize. Stewart Holbrook did this counrty, readers and historians a great service by capturing these slices of history. A totally enjoyable read.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews